Steam payment HUGE price increase!

[Legewiel]

I think I am being a bit thick
But that is how exchange rates work isn't it? They look at a countries average income, levels of unemployment, cost of living, GDP and many many other economic factors and say OK my 1 USD is the relative value of your 3.15 BRL.

So while I appreciate that an announcement would have been courteous if not required by the ToS I must be missing something if this has suddenly become totally unaffordable when the relative value in real terms is now the same as in every other country

I'm not an economist, but i doubt that exchange rates are calculated on the way you said. Japanese's Yen have an exchange rate even worse than Brazilian's Real and Japan is a first world country and in a way better shape than Brazil, but it's interesting for Japan to keep yen cheaper so they can export more products than importing and they do produce a lot of things, unlike Brazil. So yeah it's not that easy. Best way to compare this things would be to check the monthly minimum wage on each country and convert it to dollar so you'd discover how much that person can buy in dollar.

About it being interesting or not for square to have different prices in different regions of the world, it's probably all about the potencial of each market. Russia and Brazil (among some other countries) have a lower incoming but they can potentially have a lot of customers for square cause their population is huge (Brazil is the 5th biggest country in population, Russia the 9th) and on top of that most of them can't afford high spec computers to run other games so an MMO is a good alternative as they normally require lower specs like ffxiv. And with square having no cost with servers in this regions (that is why we play with 200~300ms latency) and not even with translation costs (have you noticed that this game only have translations on rich countries?) it ends up being a good deal for them.

So that is probably why we had a different deal. To accommodate the reality of the country vs getting a lot of paying customers. This is actually pretty standard nowadays most games have a cheaper price on poor markets that have a huge sale potential so they can inflate their numbers (having a game that sells a lot is good for their business cause it brings even more attention to the game, people get attracted by this numbers and also selling it cheaper on this countries but selling more means more incoming).

Another good example is China, it's not a rich country but it's the biggest country of the world in population. They have so much potential that they have their own ffxiv server, with exclusive itens that we don't even have on NA or get it months later after much crying, Windows is a lot cheaper there and I dunno if you noticed but a lot of blockbuster movie's are being co-produced with China, cause China have a law that only allows a small number of foreign movies per year to be exhibited there unless they're co-produced. and their market is so huge that it's interesting for movie producers cause even if the movie don't go so well in the US it gets saved by the Chinese box office.