Imo those are worse. Most of those sites the ones that get keys from rando strangers are people buying them with stolen credit cards and reselling to launder legit money from it
-
Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
-
We have made minor adjustments to how the search bar works on ResetEra. You can read about the changes here.
Thunder Lotus (Spiritfarer): "85% of sales coming from Argentina and Turkey seem to be coming from people playing in other countries"
- Thread starter Rosebud
- Start date
And it will be the people in that region who are affected the most.
I see this all the time in my line of work. People abuse regional pricing for absolutely everything. You should have seen the absolute meltdown that happened backstage at Blizzard when the Ruble became unworkable -- people by the thousands ticketing in because they suddenly can't pay for their underpriced subscriptions and WoW Tokens and they're actually not in Russia at all, but like Canada or the US or some shit.
This was rampant -- this is rampant.
Moreso this is what happens when 85% of sales for a specific product come from people who want to abuse its regional pricing to pay a little less for their luxury entertainment that most of them are very likely to be able to afford anyway.
This was rampant -- this is rampant.
Moreso this is what happens when 85% of sales for a specific product come from people who want to abuse its regional pricing to pay a little less for their luxury entertainment that most of them are very likely to be able to afford anyway.
And that's not the only thing abused as hell in Turkey. When Turkish lira took a deep dive, all the supermarkets in the western shores were raided by Greeks, Bulgarians and Romanians. To the point where local folk had trouble finding anything to eat. Greeks crashed the house market in Aegean cities and that happened way too fast because the government actually encourages foreign people to buy real estate in Turkey.
Only way to solve this problem is fixing the inflation rate in Turkey. By the looks of things, it looks more and more impossible.
Only way to solve this problem is fixing the inflation rate in Turkey. By the looks of things, it looks more and more impossible.
If its any consolation, some of the more... aggressive pubs seem to have walked things back somewhat, and some are intentionally undercutting the big players to make their games more attractive.
Guys, trying to sell at US price parity on STEAM , of all places, won't make your net sales go up. People in less well-off regions aren't magically going to earn more money to pay for your pricier games, theyre either going to wait for a deep sale (at which point theres a big chance another, more appealing game gets bought instead) or just pirate it outright when the crack drops.
If you dont agree with Valve's recommended regional pricing, sure, raise the price a bit. If your game has got strong appeal, it's still gonna sell. But put some fucking thought into it instead of matching the US price and calling it a day.
I think it's the opposite. If you can pirate you would. Abusing regional pricing means you want to pay 'legitimately" either for multiplayer, achievements, or because you've fooled yourself into thinking it's ok. In which case you have an incentive to get a non-pirated version of the game. If you were sympathetic to pirating it anyways, it seems more straightforward to just do that from the beginning rather than pay real money for a whole other account or regional version of the game.
I haven't pirated games in a long long time, but unless it's gotten significantly easier, it's still gonna be much simpler to just buy a regional account.
Can't talk for console, but on PC at least, it's a lot easier to pirate something than it is to region switch (at least when it comes to Steam). And yes, people here will end up going back to piracy, since the prices pubs are asking for their games nowadays are kinda crazy, especially when considering the extra taxes we pay on top of them.
Unrelated to your post, but related to the thread. Congrats to all the people who openly bragged about region switching to Argentina! Now thanks to your antics we get to pay whatever crazy price pubs decide to stick us with, plus our own +100% taxes, yay!
I have heard of this happening with G2A, but CDKeys as well?
I don't know man, but just think about it. CDKeys has some incredibly cheap keys. Where do you think they come from? They gotta be either buying from other regions or other individuals. And selling them to individuals in wealthier countries. Regardless of the specifics, one way or another the developer is losing out because you bought a 50+ dollar game for 5-10 dollars.
They're talking specifically about stolen credit cards though. We know CDKeys are grey region, the other part doesn't appear to be true.
User banned (3 days): Advocating regional price abuse with false equivalence
Don't often these same developers and publishers regularly abuse the global market to hire cheap contractors to make these games. But when consumers attempt to use the same system they are now worse than pirates?
CDKeys only deals with legitimate keys, never ones that are bought with stolen credit cards, etc. That's why CDKeys prices have skyrocketed compared to what games used to be priced on it like 10+ years ago. New games might be say $45 instead of $50 from sites like GMG or Game Billet that get their keys from the actual publisher. The reason CDKeys is Grey market is because they don't source their keys direct from the publisher, but at the same time they don't get their keys from people that are potentially selling stolen keys like user based marketplace keyshops do.
Interesting. Hot UK deals is rife with posts about cheap PS games on the Turkey PSN store. I've never bothered with it myself but it seems pretty popular.
this is always a hilarious line of reasoning because it's a flawed analogy on top of being a misleading one
people from high income and low income countries contributing to a game and getting paid relative to their cost of living -> people from high income and low income countries buying games relative to their cost of living
the suggestion that people from high income countries deserve to get games for lower prices because that's what it's sold for over there is more analogous to developers paying people in high income countries what people in low income countries make for a salary
which obviously isn't happening
also definitely enjoying when our entire game industry workforce is summarized as 'cheap contractors'. get over yourself
This hurts indie game developers more than big publishers. If an indie game developer wants to hire the services of someone in another country for some work on their game, is that not their right? Buying a key from another region's market is paying for something that wasn't meant to be sold to you, it's not the same. You are not entitled to the fruits of someone's labor without paying for it. The modern digital age has made this far easier and more prevalent. Decades ago you would have to travel to another country to pick up cheap goods from there, and they were real goods on a shelf. You are buying a digital copy which can be reproduced infinitely at no cost, it takes no inventory space, a store did not pay the publisher for the item to stock its shelf. It is totally different and abuseable.
This is just feel-good anti-corporate coping that someone uses to morally justify themselves doing anything they can to save a buck on their luxury hobby
Prices go so low with sales (Spiritfarer has gone down to 5 USD and below) that I don't understand why people even do this at all.
Either buy the game at full price in your actual region or wait for it to go on sale. Consumers have so many great options when buying games on PC that there's really no reason to do this.
Either buy the game at full price in your actual region or wait for it to go on sale. Consumers have so many great options when buying games on PC that there's really no reason to do this.
I don't think this is about PUNISHING anyone, it is about getting paid for their software enough money that they can continue making more software. Because the regional pricing was being taken advantage of, the price has been raised. Anyone innocent that is being negatively impacted has only the bad actors to blame, the creators of the software tried to be fair and were taken advantage of.
User banned (3 days): False equivalence, downplaying regional price abuse over a series of posts.
Whole lot of judgmental, entitled folks in here casting blanket judgements on people they don't know, with stories they don't know. Fucking shameful. Interesting how the XBL Gamepass Ultimate thread doesn't have this same gate keeping when people are openly talking about abusing regional pricing there. But that's Era - inconsistently applied principles that only matter when the narrative fits.
My country isn't recognized in steam so I have to use regional stuff. Minimum wages are lower than turkey here so I don't really feel bad about it.
It's either that or piracy and trust me when I say the recent increase in the prices are making a lot of people here to just pirate stuff.
So the claim that all of the people that don't live in the said country are regional pricing abusers is completely false.
It's either that or piracy and trust me when I say the recent increase in the prices are making a lot of people here to just pirate stuff.
So the claim that all of the people that don't live in the said country are regional pricing abusers is completely false.
It's what these pos/facists usually say, so I think a search on his post history was warranted.
It's also worth pointing out that in the case of a game with an online component, piracy does cost the developer if they are the ones paying for or supplying the servers
There are definitely a lot of cases of people who abuse regional pricing because they otherwise would never have access to games or game services, etc, because they genuinely can't afford them. I don't think anyone, even developers, mind that very much. Certainly publishers do but fuck publishers.
However, those are a very very small minority of that specific demographic of players. Obviously you'd have to take my word for it and that's worth little to nothing, but for what it's worth, most of the players I caught abusing Russian regional pricing in my work, were spending hundreds a month on other services for the game anyway. Some of them, though admitedly not most, I even caught engaging in real-money trading of in-game currency through external sites on top of the money they already spend on the game. They are not players of little means.
Back when Brazil PS+ keys worked on NA PSN ($20-30 for yearly), presumably they would just pay people in the regions to hoard cards since I did not hear about stolen credit cards. I think PS+ was the only thing I bought from these places but that is gone now.
Do they care more about region locked games. I'd love to get the other PC SRW releases but I recall VPNs being against TOS and didn't want to risk losing my 600+ game steam account from when steam first launched.
You do need to VPN to Argentina for Xbox. Every eBay code seller says this.
Brazil Xbox Live codes are region locked to Brazilian accounts. You can see this on sites selling gift cards from around the world.
Rest of the world afaik, yeah, no restrictions.
From 12,5 TL (lowest) to 280 TL ?! Great job abusers , valve and this company. Just to give some information, for the last few years when we had regional pricing in Turkey lots of new gamers especially young ones built up their steam libraries and really went into pc gaming "legally" now with these developments we are again back to piracy days once more ... Ain't no way people would pay 10 to 20 times to any game. (of course high income still exists to a minority but they are just that, a minor part of the population.)
OP
OP
"Entitled" to what? Fair regional pricing that shouldn't be abused? Yes they are.
And it's the same for Game Pass and any other service
As a player living in Turkey, I feel sorry for this situation. I had to purchase a one-month EA Pro subscription to play Dead Space Remake. Game prices are increasing day by day in the country. The prices of some games on the Steam platform have increased exponentially.
Not a fair characterization.
Parts of the United States are unbelievably bad. Ask Black folks living in Flint, Michigan how it feels having lead in the water.
The wealth stratification in the US is the worst it has ever been. Some people are fabulously, luxuriously comfortable. Many, many more are poor, desperate, starving, one medical bill away from homelessness and ruin.
So if they try to get a game cheaper, they're taking advantage of other people?
This is a complex topic, and there are absolutely rich people gaming the system and ruining it for everyone. But don't assume that just because someone is from a rich country they have it better. The depths of squalor and poverty in the US would truly shock you.
Whatever Steam is doing to stop this is clearly not working and I don't think raising prices is the answer. It sucks for people in those regions and I bet once every region pricing has gotten to no better than a hard conversion from USD to local currency those cheap bastards will just pirate the game instead.
Publishers are greedy fucks. Increasing prices in countries with lower income is never about punishing those that game the system, it's about bigger profit margins. It's just another means to justify being greedy.
Turkey and Argentina communists presidents.
The world according to an American. You are all brainwashed to the bone. Keep on enjoying your techno feudal regime that you call "Democracy".
Ah, countering stupidity with sweeping stupid generalizations eh?
I don't think this works as they expect it to work. These people go to those methods because that's what they''re willing to pay. I don't think they're going to pay more just because you get rid of those circumnventions. Kinda like piracy. If people pirate it's because they're not willing to pay in the first place.
And by increasing the prices you're only hurting the locals from those countries.
And by increasing the prices you're only hurting the locals from those countries.
Keep the xenophobic bullshit to yourself. The person you responded to is Brazilian anyway.
That poster is Brazilian. Way to show your ass to everyone. Now, if you would be so kind as to show it out the door.
Aren't you the same one that got upset at Bolsonaro being called fascist?
I mean... They used the word "communist" unironically, so you know what to expect.
As many users post time and time again, there are several loopholes still active. An easy youtube search yields many totorials. We lost regional pricing thanks to this, and many users here don't even care. Many of my friends stopped buying on steam and went back to piracy.
Because banning everything we don't like makes this place boring. Hate speech, yes. Insults, yes. Opinions that just kinda suck? Eh
