Steam payment HUGE price increase!

[Denner1623]

@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.

[DoppelShifter]

@Enkrateia
[snip]

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.

[Rsmeers]

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.

[Shedon]

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:

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.

[Ckrownz]

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

[Lordlord]

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.

[Shedon]

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

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?

[Nezia]

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

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

[Ckrownz]

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

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.

[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.