Steam payment HUGE price increase!

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Originally Posted by Nezia

So... what about the auto renew option on Steam?

At least in Brazil the values of the auto renew did not change, are we to expect these values to be adjusted? Or we just sit and wait for another 'surprise'?

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I have been told that the only reason it hasn't changed yet is because it works like a contract, and they can/may change it every year if they want to. So basically its probably gonna stay that low for a while, then after some time also get adjusted.

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Originally Posted by Nezia

So... what about the auto renew option on Steam?

At least in Brazil the values of the auto renew did not change, are we to expect these values to be adjusted? Or we just sit and wait for another 'surprise'?

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kinda want to know about this too, hate to see a second surprise

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Originally Posted by Nezia

So... what about the auto renew option on Steam?

At least in Brazil the values of the auto renew did not change, are we to expect these values to be adjusted? Or we just sit and wait for another 'surprise'?

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in Russia auto renew prices didnt change either. i hope next surprice that we will see will be about changing prices back

I would like also to recommend change Steam recommendation and opinion for the game and spread the word so others will not fall for this like us did. The best we do know is help others by not making our mistake.

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Originally Posted by Drakanoth

I have been told that the only reason it hasn't changed yet is because it works like a contract, and they can/may change it every year if they want to. So basically its probably gonna stay that low for a while, then after some time also get adjusted.

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I heard something on these lines too, but wanna see a word from a SE representative in advance this time.

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Originally Posted by Enkrateia

As you have pointed out, we recently made adjustments to how prices in Brazilian Real and Russian Rubles are calculated for Steam users. These changes were made to bring prices using these currencies in-line with the global pricing structure based on current exchange rates. In addition, these adjustments mean that prices now accurately reflect the pricing provided on our other official channels and currencies.

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"4. BILLING PROCEDURES AND RECURRING TRANSACTIONS
4.1 "...Square Enix may change fee rates at any time in its sole discretion, and will use reasonable efforts to notify you at least 30 days in advance of any changes to any Recurring Fees. All FFXIV Subscription Fees are billed in advance. All FFXIV Subscription Fees are non-refundable, with the limited exception in Section 4.7 below."

SQUARE ENIX NEVER NOTICED US THAT PRICES WOULD BE ADJUSTED!

Sorry but, SQUARE ENIX ARE WRONG!

as i see, this is "notification in 30 days". first autopay in old prices, next in new.
okey, dear SE. I've bought all packs in steam, now you change everything. y whould i buy them once more if there is nothing new in steam? Ive bought already 2 ff14 origin games, when the game comes out and it was pointed, that steam game has its own policies. for now steam and non steam are equal. so, whould you transfer me all my addons and characters from steam account to my non steam account? or what?

Economics and localisation aside, the timing and none announcement of that hike coinciding with the SB release is pretty appaling and shady.

I hope you all manage to get refunds where its applicable :/

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Originally Posted by BlastHardcheese

Economics and localisation aside, the timing and none announcement of that hike coinciding with the SB release is pretty appaling and shady.

I hope you all manage to get refunds where its applicable :/

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That would be great. Refund me addons i bought before SB, potions ive bought after login, and im pleased.

Contacted Square Enix support and this is what I got:
http://imgur.com/a/rkHuK

Basically, the decision is deliberate. Now we need to know if Square will actually budge over it, because a lot of people will not resub after this.

I'm really angry that the SE doesn't respect their own rules, could anyone can contact the support and tell that what they have done is against what is written on the guidelines ?

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Originally Posted by DoppelShifter

Contacted Square Enix support and this is what I got:
http://imgur.com/a/rkHuK

Basically, the decision is deliberate. Now we need to know if Square will actually budge over it, because a lot of people will not resub after this.

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Thanks for sharing. Sadly, I doubt they'll go back on it. :\
Wish there was at least some way for us to refund Stormblood. I've been playing this game since 2.0 and it means a lot to me, but there's no way I can renew my subscription after this. Even if I could comfortably afford it (which I cannot), I wouldn't want to pay for this game after this whole thing happened.

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Originally Posted by aekh

Thanks for sharing. Sadly, I doubt they'll go back on it. :\
Wish there was at least some way for us to refund Stormblood. I've been playing this game since 2.0 and it means a lot to me, but there's no way I can renew my subscription after this. Even if I could comfortably afford it (which I cannot), I wouldn't want to pay for this game after this whole thing happened.

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Agreed!
I dont either.

I really dont know what SQUARE ENIX doing.
It's so SAD.

https://thumb.ibb.co/e6O44k/yoshida_san.png

im sorry Yoshida-san but with the recents events the game is being less attractive for some people around the world and probably losing some people who already play :(

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Originally Posted by iCeres

"4. BILLING PROCEDURES AND RECURRING TRANSACTIONS
4.1 "...Square Enix may change fee rates at any time in its sole discretion, and will use reasonable efforts to notify you at least 30 days in advance of any changes to any Recurring Fees. All FFXIV Subscription Fees are billed in advance. All FFXIV Subscription Fees are non-refundable, with the limited exception in Section 4.7 below."

SQUARE ENIX NEVER NOTICED US THAT PRICES WOULD BE ADJUSTED!
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First of all, I think it is horrible business practice to have not notified players about this change in pricing. However, "Recurring Fees" would refer to things like Auto Renew NOT one time subscription purchases. You are buying 30 days of game time (essentially a product with a defined length and expiration)but you are not signing up for a recurring fee, technically, unless you choose auto renew. In fact, people have mentioned the auto renew price has not changed...probably not a coincidence.

http://pp.userapi.com/c836138/v83613...qYxESxzrGE.jpg

This feel pretty shady. To be honest they might lost money from this. Lost sub is lost sub. I think they are assuming people will keep subbing no matter what.

It's not about what they're doing but HOW they're doing. If they had warned us about it and if they had planned to do this at the end of HW xpac, for example, things would be different now. But it's feels bad to think that this xpac was just a bait to fill the servers before make us to pay 2x or 3x more.

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Originally Posted by Mirror_s

As a new player, i'm very disappointed in this move. The game is great, and subscription price was very affordable for russians, at leas

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I like to craft and in that case FFXIV is too close to f2p games because of very limited free space and monthly paid retainers for solving that.
It was ok with regional pricing. But with x3 increase it will cut too much from my entertaiment budget so I not shure in future subscription.

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Originally Posted by Fren4eg

many of my friends wanted to join the ff xiv

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I am invited a lot of friends in the 2015, and now convinced my old WoW raid group to try the FFXIV in this september. But now part of them just can't afford it - too "optimised" salary in the last few years.

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Originally Posted by iCeres

"4. BILLING PROCEDURES AND RECURRING TRANSACTIONS
4.1 "...Square Enix may change fee rates at any time in its sole discretion, and will use reasonable efforts to notify you at least 30 days in advance of any changes to any Recurring Fees. All FFXIV Subscription Fees are billed in advance. All FFXIV Subscription Fees are non-refundable, with the limited exception in Section 4.7 below."

SQUARE ENIX NEVER NOTICED US THAT PRICES WOULD BE ADJUSTED!

Sorry but, SQUARE ENIX ARE WRONG!

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I'd love to feel the support is caring beyond than just talking about it... I'm having to pay for a tunneling service already due to the last server relocation and ping increases, it is unfair to pay even more.
Great job, SE. Great job. I used to love this game and protect it all the way i could; bring new players and all else alike. Now i'm unable to pay for it, who's gonna say recommend it then... Managed to kill a significant part of the userbase right when it grew with Stormblood.

@Enkrateia
The conversion rates aren't actually as simple as Brazillians use 3.12 reals the same way US uses $1 USD. 47R$ for us may be around 15$ for you guys, which may be around 1% of your minimum wage, but for us, still 47 bucks which would be 5% of our minimum wage, and if we add up a VPN that its most likely mandatory to use, cuz there is no South America servers like WoW has (specially now with the servers moving to west coast, making thousands of people to have high latency), we will be spending almost 10% of our minimum wage. Monthly.
That goes for Brazil, idk about how the other countries are dealing with this, but i do believe that alot of people will just quit cuz of this.

And still, support says that those regions were paying lesser prices.
http://imgur.com/a/rkHuK

I think that SE should understand that they made deal with a plataform like Steam which always make the prices so that people from a specific region can afford buying, instead of paying the real price doing a stupid money conversion, or else AAA games would cost 300+ in brazil.

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Originally Posted by Denner1623

@Enkrateia
[snip]

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Not only that, but look at other games that have subscription models (World of Warcraft) or that rely heavily on microtransactions (Warframe): they actually changed their prices across regions to try to adequate it to the playerbase's economical situation. For example, a WoW sub costs 15USD (same as FFXIV, which converts to over 50BRL after taxes), but the official sub price in Brazil is 23,90 BRL , and that's AFTER a price update (it used to be even lower, at 14,90BRL). Warframe also practices much lower prices for their microtransactions, with their 5USD tier costing 10BRL rather than over 17BRL.

Basically Square Enix is walking backwards in regards to their global pricing policies. Even worse, they're doing worse than ACTIVISION in that regard.

Exactly. We're able to buy many games with the price we'll be spending with a game that doesn't mind its playerbase and changes prices without previous warnings. Doesn't sounds great.
And it happened right after i bought a renaming service; Guess i'll be asking for a refund, as i won't be able to play the game anymore anyway.

As a Brazilian, I already got hit pretty hard with the servers being moved (ping jumped from 190 to 330), and now with the subscription being almost R$50 I won't be playing anymore for sure. I mean, I can handle play with 330ping, but this price is too much. It's a shame because I really like XIV and was enjoying Stormblood.
Just to give a little context, quoting someone from reddit:

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the minimum wage in the US is $7.25 per hour. So to pay the $15 sub if you were paid that would take a little over two hours of work. It's effort, but not a lot.
Brazil's minimum wage comes out to 4 Real an hour. That's 11 hours and 45 minutes worth of work to pay the 47 Real sub cost now.
If we match the hours worked and convert back, we can find roughly how ridiculously overpriced for the market that is, at $85.19. Would you pay $85.19 a month to play? That's roughly what you're asking them to do in real terms.

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We should do what the community of GTA V did, do a mass downvote on steam, maybe we'll get them attention

I know we feel betrayed, but only complainning wont do anything.

I didnt recieve any news about this when i bought stormblood.
Not even 30 or 15 days prior like its said in the Tos.
Also, they dont really seem to care enough to give us enough feedback on that, its a simple "it happened, deal with it".

So lets get this public, Kotaku, IGN and others would like to share the news to the other player base about whats happening.

We got our SUB increase with NO notification exactly some days after the expiration date for refund on stormblood at steam, thats serious.
Too bad for us brazilian and Russians? It can happen to you you all someday, please look foward to it.

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Originally Posted by Ckrownz

We should do what the community of GTA V did, do a mass downvote on steam, maybe we'll get them attention

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The best anwser for them in this case is just everyone who got affected by this to stop paying the subscription, once they realize how many players they lost because of this, maybe they'll start considering turning the prices to Regional and not Globally Equal.
Getting a Regional payment would not only be good for Brazil/Russia, but also to other countries and even SE.
Game being affordable = more people playing = more subscriptions = more money

And of course there will be people saying "but now we are all paying the same amount", well, not every country has the same economy. While it takes someone from the US 2 hours of work to pay for 1 mounth of subscription, someone in Brazil needs to work almost 12 hours to pay for the same amount of gametime. Do you really think someone would spent that much?

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Originally Posted by Shedon

The best anwser for them in this case is just everyone who got affected by this to stop paying the subscription, once they realize how many players they lost because of this, maybe they'll start considering turning the prices to Regional and not Globally Equal.
Getting a Regional payment would not only be good for Brazil/Russia, but also to other countries and even SE.
Game being affordable = more people playing = more subscriptions = more money

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Even better would be asking for a refund from Steam, or even SE itself.

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Originally Posted by Shedon

The best anwser for them in this case is just everyone who got affected by this to stop paying the subscription, once they realize how many players they lost because of this, maybe they'll start considering turning the prices to Regional and not Globally Equal.
Getting a Regional payment would not only be good for Brazil/Russia, but also to other countries and even SE.
Game being affordable = more people playing = more subscriptions = more money

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Well, most people will stop paying the sub for sure, its a consequence, but to try to solve this situation faster we should give a faster response. Or for via mass downvote on steam or tell this for some jornalist (like jim sterling) that care for this.

The Steam store page for FFXIV is already being bombarded with negative reviews, and their score is indeed being affected (it dropped from an average 85% to a 72% "recent" average -- and then it dropped to 71% as I was writing this). Still could use some more momentum, though.

Some people already contacted journalists about this and the word is spreading.

Let's see who will react first: Square Enix to plug this potential PR nightmare, or the megaphones that are shouting about SE's poorly chosen business decisions.

A basic salary in Brazil is around 280 USD, how much is in a rich country?

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Originally Posted by DoppelShifter

The Steam store page for FFXIV is already being bombarded with negative reviews, and their score is indeed being affected (it dropped from an average 85% to a 72% "recent" average -- and then it dropped to 71% as I was writing this). Still could use some more momentum, though.

Some people already contacted journalists about this and the word is spreading.

Let's see who will react first: Square Enix to plug this potential PR nightmare, or the megaphones that are shouting about SE's poorly chosen business decisions.

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Any journalists have given an answer ?

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Originally Posted by Edduard

A basic salary in Brazil is around 280 USD, how much is in a rich country?

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In the US, it's 7.25 USD per hour (multiplying a 40h workweek by 4 weeks, we have 1160 USD).

And if a quick Google and Wikipedia search are to be believed, it's a almost 1400 EUR in the UK and almost 1500 EUR in Germany.

That kind of disparity is one of the reasons why games like WoW and Warframe (and a good chunk of the Steam library) have different prices per region, so they can charge an optimal amount that will get them good profits and still fit the pockets of the average player of that country (which increases the player base, and thus the number of active subscriptions, and thus the total revenue).

Matter of comparison, the very same 15USD subscription for World of Warcraft costs, in Brazil, 23,90BRL (by Blizzard's own updated price table). Square is charging over double that with the updated prices for Brazil, and it might be even worse for the Russian players.

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Originally Posted by DoppelShifter

Matter of comparison, the very same 15USD subscription for World of Warcraft costs, in Brazil, 23,90BRL (by Blizzard's own updated price table). Square is charging over double that with the updated prices for Brazil, and it might be even worse for the Russian players.

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And we have a server with 20 ping not 320.

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Originally Posted by Ckrownz

Any journalists have given an answer ?

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I've heard that some people contacted Kotaku, Jim Sterling, Sid Alpha and some others. Might as well keep contacting them, with more and more people, as the volume of people will basically prove it's a story worth mentioning (*politely*, please. We don't need a voiceless angry mob).

And an update on the Steam store page, the score dropped some more and now it's almost falling from "Mostly Positive" to "Mixed" (this might happen in the next few hours if the reviews keep comming).

While im sympathetize with the situation here, please also bear in mind there are russians site actually making profit off this region pricing adjustment thingy. This is probably an attempt to curb the russian website. What they do is use the gift function to deliver stuff at way cheaper price.

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Originally Posted by MelvinK

While im sympathetize with the situation here, please also bear in mind there are russians site actually making profit off this region pricing adjustment thingy. This is probably an attempt to curb the russian website. What they do is use the gift function to deliver stuff at way cheaper price.

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Even if this issue is real, this "solution" was extremely harmful for *all* legitimate players from those regions, which makes it a terribly shortsighted decision. They're losing subscribers, getting lots of negative atention and negative press... over what? Poorly handled microtransactions?

There are multiple other games that also practice differential pricing (and in a much broader implementation than what Square Enix did for FFXIV) and do not suffer with issues like the one you mentioned (or when they do, it doesn't affect their bottom line enough to justify removing the differential prices, and all the benefits that come with it).

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Originally Posted by MelvinK

While im sympathetize with the situation here, please also bear in mind there are russians site actually making profit off this region pricing adjustment thingy. This is probably an attempt to curb the russian website. What they do is use the gift function to deliver stuff at way cheaper price.

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Actually this is kinda impossible for many reasons, this is not the reason why they increased the fee.

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Originally Posted by DoppelShifter

Even if this issue is real, this "solution" was extremely harmful for *all* legitimate players from those regions, which makes it a terribly shortsighted decision. They're losing subscribers, getting lots of negative atention and negative press... over what? Poorly handled microtransactions?

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It most likely is real. Heck, it was apparently a "well known" practice for individual NA WoW players to pay for their sub in BRL...Blizzard nipped it in the bud years ago though (that is how I even found out about people doing it.) I wouldn't be surprised if some FF14 players are doing just that as well through Steam...could be at least one of the reasons for the change.

Just dropping by to show my support. What SE has done is completely unethical (even if I think that they should've adjusted the prices a bit anyway, like to WoW's ones), as at the very least they should've warned you of the change beforehand. As it stands, they played bait and switch due to the timing in regards to the expansion launch, and I can't agree with that. It's a clear lack of respect towards their customers, and every single one of us should be alarmed about this happening, even if it doesn't effect us this time. On top of that they haven't even apologised about how they've handled it, as you just got a "yeah, we changed it" and that's all. This is setting a very bad precedent.

I hope that they do something about this. Moreover, at this point I think that Yoshida himself should take a step forward and talk about it.