Quote Originally Posted by Penthea View Post
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.