Subscription

[Penthea]

Regional pricing is pretty shitty on a lot of games (just look at what EA did not too long ago). SE needs to get with the times in A LOT of areas. This being one of them. OP isn't asking for special treatment. He's asking for pricing to be adjusted to the proper currency values for his region. There's a difference between asking for a lower price because you're not economically well off versus fair regional pricing.

I wonder if the lack of this has to do with how the regions are separated. I don't mean our data centres. I mean that there is the FFXIV we play, the version that China plays and the version that Korea plays. I wouldn't be surprised if the pricing and even the payment methods are different in China or Korea. It certainly would be easy for SE to give them different prices and ways to pay because their game servers are separate to ours.

For SE to do what OP would want, which would be a subscription fee proportionate to how much people get paid in their country instead of how it is now (in which people like OP end up paying a crazy high price due to the value of their home's currency) they might need to change how the Mog Station determines what region you are in. It wouldn't be a simple thing because obviously they would want to prevent, for example, European players pretending they're in a different location to get a super cheap sub.

I completely agree that SE should do something to make the game more accessible to countries that are at a very noticeable disadvantage due to the currency they use, but accomplishing this in a way that cannot be abused is likely not a simple task.

Additionally there is no way to change the currency you pay in. I know this from starting the game in a country that uses euro and I'm now living in the UK which has a different currency. So they would need to change this as well.

I'm not sure if SE would do it though because perhaps the community that are in OP's position is small. However that could be in part due to the price. There are probably a lot of potential players who are abstaining from playing because the price is too high. There could be an untapped market. Hopefully with the rising popularity of the game SE will take into consideration how the value of currency can be radically different from one place to another.

[yTony]

I wonder if the lack of this has to do with how the regions are separated. I don't mean our data centres. I mean that there is the FFXIV we play, the version that China plays and the version that Korea plays. I wouldn't be surprised if the pricing and even the payment methods are different in China or Korea. It certainly would be easy for SE to give them different prices and ways to pay because their game servers are separate to ours.

For SE to do what OP would want, which would be a subscription fee proportionate to how much people get paid in their country instead of how it is now (in which people like OP end up paying a crazy high price due to the value of their home's currency) they might need to change how the Mog Station determines what region you are in. It wouldn't be a simple thing because obviously they would want to prevent, for example, European players pretending they're in a different location to get a super cheap sub.

I completely agree that SE should do something to make the game more accessible to countries that are at a very noticeable disadvantage due to the currency they use, but accomplishing this in a way that cannot be abused is likely not a simple task.

Additionally there is no way to change the currency you pay in. I know this from starting the game in a country that uses euro and I'm now living in the UK which has a different currency. So they would need to change this as well.

I'm not sure if SE would do it though because perhaps the community that are in OP's position is small. However that could be in part due to the price. There are probably a lot of potential players who are abstaining from playing because the price is too high. There could be an untapped market. Hopefully with the rising popularity of the game SE will take into consideration how the value of currency can be radically different from one place to another.

I know that the chinese server is law related. They have laws about their games, what the game can show and stuff like that. There are exclusive chinese servers for more games because of that.

About the region related fee, that'd be wonderful, yeah, but I'm simply asking for the possibility to link my SE account to my Steam account and have the same access as other people do. Steam linked accounts only have perks, like wtf

[Packetdancer]

I wonder if the lack of this has to do with how the regions are separated. I don't mean our data centres. I mean that there is the FFXIV we play, the version that China plays and the version that Korea plays. I wouldn't be surprised if the pricing and even the payment methods are different in China or Korea. It certainly would be easy for SE to give them different prices and ways to pay because their game servers are separate to ours.

The game is run/managed by entirely different non-SquareEnix companies in those regions. In China, FFXIV is run by Shengqu Games, and in Korea it's run by Actoz Games. That's why they have entirely different account systems; as I understand it—and someone please correct me if I'm wrong—those accounts actually have gametime that works like prepaid phone cards; you buy X hours of game time, and as you play that ticks down. If you play a ton all at once you might need to buy more, but if you have to take a break for a month or whatever, the unused game time would presumably stick around.

If I had to take a guess at why the Brazilian pricing changed, I'd assume it's because handling billing differently for different regional currencies was causing extra complexity for SquareEnix whereas, with steam, Valve handles all that added complexity. It's not a great choice to just say "only Steam users get a subscription fee adjusted for their regional currency", but I suppose in some ways I can see why it might be a choice that gets made.

Really, SquareEnix just needs to allow folks to move things between Steam and non-Steam accounts, like others have said. I'm certain there are a lot of issues to do so behind the scenes—billing probably being handled through entirely separate systems, for instance—but that seems like a problem that's probably worth solving. Or, if nothing else, having an option still to transfer a non-Steam account into Steam, even if there's no option to do the reverse.