Steam payment HUGE price increase!

[silentwindfr]

i gonna just point out a few thing, first price is dependant of the taxe of the country, example in europe we have a taxe that affect the pricing of online gaming.
we had the same issue with the secret world, where because of european taxe we was paying higher than US. then check if no new taxe on your side didn't appear before think SE try to screw you.

second did you try to contact Steam for see if is SE fault before come here? or contact SE for have a bit of answer? i doubt anyone gonna come answer on this forum about pricing. the best way is to contact the support for get an explanation.

[Texa]

It would be nice if we had a faq on the front page of some kind since so much of the thread had turned into people repeating themselves.

[Nezia]

It would be nice if we had a faq on the front page of some kind since so much of the thread had turned into people repeating themselves.

Hum... I think that most people already know what is going on, the 'offical' SE response and my TL;DR about it made it pretty clear what the relation between Steam and SE is.

I believe that most are just playing dumb in order to take credibility away from the ones who got affected by the changes, since they can not post here what they are really thinking about the issue. Read the comments on SidAlpha video and you will understand what most people who are on SE side are actually thinking.

[Rofel]

second did you try to contact Steam for see if is SE fault before come here? or contact SE for have a bit of answer? i doubt anyone gonna come answer on this forum about pricing. the best way is to contact the support for get an explanation.

Yes, Steam said its the dev who sets the exchange rate.

And yes, believe it or not, the only official answer we've had so far was posted ON THIS TOPIC by a representative. It's lost among hundreds of posts but it is in there.

Edit: found it.

Greetings, everyone!

First, I would like to thank you all for your patience while I got information that could be provided to you. I understand this is an important concern for many of you, and had hoped I would be able to get back to you yesterday, so you would not have to go so long without an update. I would also like to thank you for keeping the thread civil and informative for each other. While there are certainly different perspectives, your tone with each other has been respectful, which allows this discussion to continue.

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.

Thank you again for your understanding and patience while I worked to get this information for you. If people are finding additional pricing discrepancies outside of what was mentioned, please let me know, so they can be looked into.

LGM Enkrateia

[silentwindfr]

life is unfair, what you want i say, i doubt SE will really move from this post or vid there and there...
you can try, i hope for you it will, but honestly since the price of the online gaming have almost not move for 20+ years i will not be surprise to see an increase there and there.

[Princess_Momoka]

life is unfair, what you want i say, i doubt SE will really move from this post or vid there and there...
you can try, i hope for you it will, but honestly since the price of the online gaming have almost not move for 20+ years i will not be surprise to see an increase there and there.

and a business is free to lose business over too high prices, whatever they want I suppose.

[Rofel]

Im not asking you to say anything, Im just replying to both of your questions. xD

I am repeating myself but we have no problem with SE adjusting the rate per se. The problems are detailed on the last couple pages, I think its worth the read.

[Vizu00]

life is unfair, what you want i say, i doubt SE will really move from this post or vid there and there...
you can try, i hope for you it will, but honestly since the price of the online gaming have almost not move for 20+ years i will not be surprise to see an increase there and there.

Online gaming price shouldn't increase actually, the avarage Joe doesn't know about inflation and currency valuation, historically what makes online gaming expensive was the storage costs and Dev time. Storage is cheap nowadays, so it is only the development costs that actually matter in a subscription. I should also say that most of the price is just profits

[silentwindfr]

Online gaming price shouldn't increase actually, the avarage Joe doesn't know about inflation and currency valuation, historically what makes online gaming expensive was the storage costs and Dev time. Storage is cheap nowadays, so it is only the development costs that actually matter in a subscription. I should also say that most of the price is just profits

did you notice that FF14 get an huge amount of content added every 3 month? more than any other mmo can pretend to do.... you do expect them to do this for free? wake up, yes the storage have become less expensive, but the investment for make a mmo nowaday is astronomical, that a huge reason of why the genre is dying, because get back the money invested into it is.... hard.

anyway, like i have said, thing are never fair, but i do hope you will get what you want.

that said don't act like you are in your right, since the ToS say it, they are free to change the price as they want. if you are unhappy the best way is to unsub and say them why... they will be forced to change them way or not... who know what can pass by the head of the one that decide the price.
since for information, it's not yoshida and his team that decide this... but SE and we know how well they like to use FF14 benefit for cover the cost of dev of other game, like for FF15.

[Vizu00]

I\'ll give you some notion of how much it costs to keep a MMORPG running,the numbers were taken from Blizzard, however the rates shouldn\'t be much different else, as you said, square wouldn\'t be able to pump content every 3 months.


Server upkeep per player: 0,1usd
Development + customer service + regional support(website etc) : 1-5 USD
Profits: everything else

Should be noted that Blizzard were recovering all the costs of the last 4 years of WoW development every 2 months.
And this rates a probably skewed, since wow overall costs most certainly have fallen.
This means that square could actually keep Russia subscription price at 5 USD and still make a profit, albeit a small one.

Any digital good you have a threshold that you recover the initial investment and your profit becomes almost 100%u0025 of the product price since the reproduction cost is negligible.

For a MMORPG once you have a certain amount of players you will only have an increase in costs once the current server infrastructure cannot support the playerbase, and it is a one time increase so you don\'t need to consider it in the long term.

What happens nowadays is that most mmorpgs cannot get to the first threahold, because WoW exists offering a huge amount of content for a set price, this means that you can never think about charging more than wow sub if you want to go the P2P route. So you need to offer "better" content for the same price as WoW, since you only need a minimum amount of subscribers to remain operational (look at ffxi).

Your operation costs are fixed at 0,1 USD per player and your allocated resources for the development are fixed, so a strategy is reducing the profit margin( that is huge) so that you can increase the profits by increasing the amount of subscribers. This is called regional pricing.


So I can guarantee you that square wasn\'t losing money on BRs sub and probably wasn\'t losing in the Russian one, they had lower profits, but you cannot claim that the reduced price was not contributing to the development of the game since profit exclude any amount you allocate for "maintenance" of the product since most places set the budget for each project with some antecedence


Tl;Dr: Square wasn\'t offering a subscription for a loss in Russia, so you should be careful with the "offer content for free" statement. Most of the mmo genre problems comes from WoW existence as the standard, and a reduction of players caused by the mobile exodus


P.S. the EU ToS doesn\'t make distinction between a one time payment and a recurring payment, so it is against the ToS the change in the RU prices, even if square only calls it an adjustment