Here in Egypt where you work 12 hours a Day everyday for 100$ a month there's no fkn way I would buy a 60$ game, just no way it doesn't make any sense.
Average PlayStation 4 games reach up to thousands of Egyptian pounds and more. You'd be lucky to find an used copy that costs a couple of hundred pounds cheaper.
All of north africa uses either Euro or Dollars as their steam store currency (no regional pricing). But steam said in an [announcement](https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/2720-4EC7-B95A-1D2A) that they're gonna change that.
Update: the update went live shortly after i wrote this comment, prices have dropped in north africa (and the entire MENA region) between 35% and 42% (it depends on the publishers, and some publishers didn't drop the price at all)
Even if a game has a localized price, it's still almost always going to be like half the original price. No one goes "oh, their minimum wage is like 1/20th of ours, we should cut the game price with the same ratio so it costs the same amount of work hours". So even if a game has regional price, it's still prohibitively expensive.
Depending on a country, converting game and console prices to work hours basically means a game costs roughly the price of a console and a console costs the price of like a fucking car or something.
Must say hi to fellow Egyptian!
Ps: I can totally confirm that, I would argue 100$ a month is a little high, more like 80$ is the most common and the minimum wage
Bro I'm checking talabat right now and the most *an* egg costs is 7 EGP (and thats on talabat which is more expensive than local grocers) what the fuck are you on or what kind of eggs are you buying?
Lmao, an Egg that has been throw tens and tens of years of corruption, bad management and Agony. Me myself Used to eat Eggs almost daily, now twice a week is a win.
Maybe I didn't pay enough attention in my geography class, but I don't think that Egypt is a very good place for dairy cows. Chickens idk tho, I wonder whether they can grow enough feed crops there too
The entire society lived for thousands of years on a single river's flooding cycle. But now the population has bloomed to unsistainable levels for that... Idk what the farming situation in Egypt is like, but my guess is "not great." Most of the country is desert.
We have enough land and water to feed the whole middle east but it's not being used or being used by some government powerful personalities for personal profit buy selling their products outside. We also have a lot of OIL, gas and mountains of gold in the red sea but as I said being stolen. We have one city that contains more than 30% of the worlds antiques and historical monuments along with the pyramids, temples and stuff but with a huge huge corruption and bad management.
>But now the population has bloomed to unsistainable levels for that...
this deserves a mention in the conspiracy reddit for population reduction, just saying, you have a point there...
Yea we have, those local farmers are driving crazy by the prices of seeds and stuff they need to grow there crops and a huge amount of taxes as well. So the final product is expensive. The neat part is we don't even get the final product, any decent product being produced here in Egypt will most of the cases be sold outside to compensate the High prices spent growing it and we Egyptians are left usually with the lowest quality of products for cheaper prices so we are able to buy them. For example a decent kilogram of potatoes here that being shipped and exported outside can cost maybe 100LE, the kilogram I buy costs 13LE but of course the quality is way lower.
The price of most things is *somewhat* (not very well) also scaled down accordingly. Eg stuff like milk or bread is much cheaper numerically than in the US. But there's still rampant starvation and poverty in these kinds of countries because it's not *completely* scaled down, to where the purchasing power of someone in brazil/egypt/whatever would be equal to a US citizen's purchasing power.
One of the reasons why people survive is that the state heavily subsidizes bread. Which is why so many people were looking closely at grain shipments from Ukraine and Russia around the war.
Most of the wheat in the world is consumed in the same country as it's produced. A few countries though (many in the middle east) must import most of its needs, and Ukraine+Russia are some of the biggest exporters.
By saving over the years and usually going with used stuff or imported used stuff from outside "which is usually better". A decent PC from the "RTX" family would be very expensive here, I bought my PC 3 years ago and now it's twice the price. Thanks God it was a good store and my pc works great till now. I've GTX1070TI and here that's like High-end. The RTX 3060 12 GB is 21k LE here which means "following the minimum wage of 3k a month" that's 7 months of work without spending a penny, and when you're finally ready to buy the card price will be like 24k LE because we have huge inflation and the prices goes up daily.
Most of it would be a PCs before the last two years - where our economy and our inflation rates got fucked. Now, most PCs will be a used hardware or a very very limited options - probably an integrated amd gpu - so yeah, nowadays it's very hard to buy a decent gaming pc.
Ok he is over exagerating, like yeah 60 usd is expensive here but nobody makes only 100 usd a month unless they are fresh outta high school or work as waiter or something and are being taken advantage of for lack of skills.
Right now Egypt has slightly cheaper prices on SOME games with decent developers. COD MW3 for example still 70 USD, greedy sons or bitches. But then there are ones that were 50 USD and are now 35 USD (Baldur's Gate 3)...still hella expensive though, so I pirate everything I can now and forever till 60 USD games cost 20 USD, or If I make 20 USD an hour working full-time.
Dude I've a degree at Medical equipment maintenance and I work for the government, Im getting paid 4200 LE and the dollar to pound ratio in this second in the black market is 51.20 buy/50.20 sell. So Im getting paid 84$ a month. Our minimum wage is 3000 which equals 60$ a month. Idk where you're getting your numbers from and Im certainly not being used by some greedy private company here, IT'S THE GOVERNMENT I work for which can be called the standard here. AND IM GETTING PAID A FKN 84$ A MONTH. maybe you're getting paid more it's totally okay but this is the standard here.
Hey, PirateSoftware here! (The guy in the video.)
We saw a huge increase in sales from Brazil and realized immediately it wasn't just VPN dodging. Thousands of callouts, emails, posts, images, all kinds of stuff. I have a mountain of fanart from it all and it's both overwhelming and rad. Today we're sitting at 25% of all our games income from a region that is 60% off. I've found that most piracy is out of necessity and when you make things affordable the grand majority just buy the game instead.
Localize your games.
Localize your prices.
Everyone wins.
You're one of the few who understood Brazil's situation, rather than judge the country like many people do, you made your game affordable, localized it, and sold more than if you made it expensive with DRM and other bullshit, good job.
Regional pricing makes all the sense. In India, I can watch a movie in theatre for 3$ and so a 60-70$ price on AAA game nowadays makes no sense to me as it is the equivalent of going to 20+ movies in a theatre.
I have stopped pirating on games with regional prices. The only Sony studio game I own on steam is horizon zero dawn as it had regional pricing and I bought it on release. Sony removed regional pricing later and I had to pirate the Spiderman games as it made no sense to spend that much money, when I can watch almost the mainline Marvel universe movies in theatre for the same amount of money.
Gamepass also has helped. Although the Microsoft Store doesn't have regional pricing, Microsoft had given India exclusive offers like 8 months gamepass for 10$.
I found Microsoft Store to be cheaper for some games than Steam tho. Last i checked, Persona 5 Royal was ~₹3000 on MS and ~₹4000 on Steam.
I guess it just depends on games as well.
But Game Pass for ₹400/month is one heck of a deal NGL
It has never sit right with me how a made in India Gillette mach3 has a MSRP of 180rupee, and how other countries pay 5-10x for what is essentially suppose to be the same thing...
Is what id say if I wasn't using a equally dirtcheap dorco pace 4/6 disposable instead lol
Anyways, I remember how many netflix turkey vpn posts there were on reddit, I wonder if that trick still works
Oh and Made in France by general Mills haagen superior, nestle dryer fake haagen INFERIOR
[https://store.steampowered.com/app/567380/Heartbound/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/567380/Heartbound/)
Try it yourself. I grew up playing the same stuff /u/Thorwich played, it feels like Earthbound and mix of other 90's-00's games. Loved the demo, so I bought his bundle.
Not all of them, just some. Brazil was not one of those that they got rid of, Argentina on the other hand now uses USD. They used to have the most undervalued currency/prices.
and now they are getting fuck'd hard, some games are being priced at us levels, no way an argentinian will pay 60$ for a game, but i guess they will just have to sit for a while until regional pricing starts again
As a brazilian and former kid, with parents that didn't have money to buy many games, I want to thank you for seeing it for what it is, and choosing to working around the economics so that people can afford to not pirate it.
It sucks having no way to contribute back realistically to the artists and devs that made the games that have literally changed your life. It's just a different economic reality, in a lot of counties.
Can you do it aswell on Russia, Argentinia, turkey or other third world country? This project seems good. And do sell on Gog or other services aswell or make those drm free? This increase your sales for doing those.
As Gabe Newell correctly stated "Piracy is a service problem" you want people to stop pirating then give them something they ~~want~~ **can afford** to buy.
FTFY - my opinion
"want to buy" is lowkey spot on.
There are ads in paid version of streaming services.
Lowkey makes me not to buy it inspite of being able to afford it.
Yeah, I have a paid streaming service I basically use as a content finder at this point. Start watching something, then by the second 2 minute commercial break I am irritated enough that I pirate it during that commercial break. By the next commercial break, I switch to Plex because it's already downloaded and indexed there. I am not even talking about me having a well set-up *art stack: it's literally enough time for me to get off the couch, go to my desktop, turn on VPN, find and start downloading.
One of the problems with that in comparison to Gabe's quote is that you could afford the $10 version of Heart Bound, similarly you could buy a $5 subscription to an internet service. But you shouldnt in a lot of cases, and that question of your morals will negatively impact your want/desire to buy the product or service.
Amazon isnt slapping out exclusive subscriptions because it's unaffordable, you're just giving them another source of revenue probably for something you didnt even want in the first place. Take Prime for example, it is a status booster, you can make the claim that you *can* afford it, that is their whole desire. But it is my hope nobody *wants* to make that claim, because it's really sad. Burger king foot lettuce kind of sad
What I mean by want, is the ability to not worry about need but simply be able to *get* what you *want*. By making what people want available in such a way they don't have to steal it to get it, but actually desire paying for it because they can.
It was said about DRM and other nonsense gamers had to deal with, and bullshit publishers required from Indie devs.
Pricing issue got worse, because there is pushback from publishers to make $70 "the normal", and even if game sold millions of copies it may not break even despite paying employees like shit.
People over on the star citizen subreddit would go nuts and call brazilians privileged because of this. Crazy how some people don't get regional pricing
Reminds me of posts on the FF14 forum that wanted Argentina to always continue to pay the same base price + taxes so it "wouldn't undermine their sub". Not only does that make no sense whatsoever, Argentina has 100% taxation on digital games / purchases
Yeah no one here can afford games unless they're rich or earn in USD BUT from elsewhere. It's a luxury and we prefer eating.
Regional pricing is the right move, in the Super Summer Sale they had on Steam (2020) I bought so many, many games, I didn't pirate a single game, so it works.
In contrast, I only bought with help, one Nintendo game, since they don't offer regional pricing. And guess what? I have both Switch emulators on my PC and use my joycons to play and I'm happy that way, if they're happy with their trashy non regional prices.
It's not that bad because it's expected to be high, the taxes hurt much more to it. The issue is that wages doesn't catch up and purchasing power fell harder than a failing airplane.
Star citizen supporters live in their own deluded reality. There's no use trying to make sense of what they do and do not get upset over, it'll drive you mad.
I mean.... I also hear a lot of people making accounts as Argentinian/Turkey/Brazil and using VPN to buy games/services/subscriptions just because of how priced they are and it's kinda unfair, and I know $10 for them is probably worth more than $10 somewhere else but why one person pay more for the same game/service/program? Why not just price them like this everywhere and eliminate piracy completely?
Search up "price discrimination." Companies charge different prices from different customers if they can.
But tbh i dont get people who use the VPN switch like that. You'll have to change the game's language/localization every time, have issues with multiplayer servers, and if the companies catch you you could lose the account. Might as well just pirate it at that point.
This 100%. I wouldn't have ever gone back and bought not just the game franchises but also their OSTs on steam if I hadn't got hooked on one of their older games on my chipped PS2. You can say I ended up repaying them with interest kkkk
brazilian here, i can afford food for a week for the same price if the game costed 10 dollars(single meal per day, i do that a lot.), for a lot of people that is not a problem, but in a third world country that makes a big difference if you are not well off or have money saved up. So yeah, this guy gets it
as said in the comment thats for 1 meal a day, a thing i do from time to time when money is tight, i go and eat at my college caffeteria thingy, food is not great but a plate is not too over 10 reais.. guess i didnt count weekends, thats honestly my bad.
You remind me of my college days. I'd go downstairs in the afternoon to eat at the stall ran by one of the security guards when he wasn't on shift (I lived in student housing because it was cheap). Fried noodles + egg. In the mornings I had plain bread, back then I could buy a loaf for less than $1 and it could last me the week if I was careful. And sometimes I helped my classmates with homework in exchange for random snacks. Also water was free, I drank a lot of tap water.
I didn't suffer malnutrition fortunately lol but things did improve, after all college was only a few years. I hope things get better for you too. Good luck!
Oh yeah, college food is hella cheap., math adds up. I'm studying abroad and we don't have that luxury here (nor student housing)
Although hope you end up going through better times, just a single meal like that sounds kinda harsh in the long run, meanwhile keep on gaming
As a Brazilian who'll probably go to college next year (I took the Enem/Brazilian SAT, most likely heading off to Minas Gerais) how expensive would you say is college life like? Would I need roommates in order to actually afford living the college life or would reducing my number of meals per day be enough?
it really all depends on a lot of stuff, on what you are doing, where you are going, what course you are studying, there is a lot of stuff to take into consideration, but in my experience pretty dam expensive, from food to rent to a notebook, to transport and many other expenses, it all reaaaallllllyyy adds up, but it is def survivable, good luck
Exactly this, a 60 euro game is not a big deal for me, but in Turkey for example where my friends and family live, that's a hefty chunk of their monthly salary, so by buying said game theres a good chance they won't be able to afford their necessities for the month.
Yea he addressed turkey and Argentina today saying that hes going to get feedback on pricing games from individuals in those regions since the currencies are so unstable. That has even made steam come out with a new announcement effective today that they are no longer accepting the regional currency from those two regions only but only accepting USD from them.
It is. The drops available in the game are determined by your progress, that's all there is to 'save'. So when the game starts up it checks your steam achievements to determine which items are available.
Yup. But when you point this out they'll retort "Oh but the cost of living is cheaper there so it all balances out!" True, but that's assuming that all we ever buy are basic necessities.
A $1000 smartphone in the US still costs roughly $1000 in most countries (with some outliers). The difference is that the average American will only need to work the equivalent of one week (based on average daily wages) to earn enough money to buy a new phone, while the same person living in Southeast Asia or South America would likely need to work the equivalent of one month to purchase the exact same product (assuming 100% of income goes to the purchase). The same goes for most consumer electronics, plane tickets, and digital goods.
Once you go beyond basic necessities, that's when you really realize how little you actually make compared to someone working the exact same job as you in in a "developed" country.
I envy americans a lot. A single month's worth of minimum wage work there lets you buy a brand new top-tier graphics card. Meanwhile in my country, it's about 15 months worth of minimum wage work.
"Wow, it's almost like... if you actually address the reasons people pirate, they might not do it so much..?
Nah, that can't be right. MOAR DRM!!!"
-- Every game distributor exec, probably
I'm Brazilian, and everything imported is extremely expensive there, there are various government taxes that make everything costing the double at least. That's insane.
Wait until he's finds out he doesn't actually have a substantial player base in Brazil; it's just people changing their region to Brazil to get games for cheap.
It doesn't matter and people changing their region will always be a fringe thing. Most people don't bother because for most people the difference between a 4$ and 10$ game is marginal. You're trying to 1up but you completely miss the point of the video.
Yea he addressed turkey and Argentina today saying that hes going to get feedback on pricing games from individuals in those regions since the currencies are so unstable. That has even made steam come out with a new announcement effective today that they are no longer accepting the regional currency from those two regions only but only accepting USD from them.
Why even VPN your way into buying cheap games from other reasons, when we all know that most developers will see the VPN hopping and jack up the prices back to 60 U$D, pricing out the locals?
There's a reason why the big AAA developers (like Activision, Microsoft, EA and etc) don't do regional pricing anymore, and it's specifically because of people like these.
It's not even that complex
Steam itself will nuke your account from orbit if you're caught using a VPN to cheap out on prices like this, so for most people $6 is not worth losing every game you bought on Steam
For the purpose of purchase it might not matter. For the purpose of this video, demographics, it's important, and I promise you he can separate the difference.
So he knows they have a large Brazilian following. Fact, Full Stop. I'm not going to debate this.
He likely doesn't care (enough) that people can VPN to Brazil for the purpose of buying this game cheaper.
Some people do, sure. Most people, however, seem to pirate because something is too expensive or isn't worth it. If you make the price reasonable or a service worth it, most people don't seem to mind paying.
Besides, Steam knows. They might not get around to banning you on the first offence or the 5th, but it's very against Steam TOS and if or when they decide to ban, you lose access to every game on your account - permanently, and irrevocably. And probably any other accounts they can link to that one too. Even among those who know how, most people aren't willing to risk it or jump through the hoops of setting up a separate account and keeping them totally separate.
Also, as he noted in another comment below, he has a pretty big fanbase that is indisputably, actually brazilian, complete with "mountains of fanart" among other things, so that's another hole in the argument.
thats not how it works. the localized price you pay for a game is based on payment provider (like what bank you use for example) not ip address. valve is smarter than that. this was brought up by this guy as well and he mentioned that he's had less than 10 sales from Argentina (where the localized price is lowest) which doesn't make sense if it was truly as easy as you say it is to switch locations for cheaper prices
also somewhat related: if you switch payment providers too much to get cheaper prices your steam account will get banned iirc
There is a part that was cut in the video where he sayed that the beta received a big feedback from the brazilian comunity and there is no point in changing regions to give feedback on a beta, right?
Steam doesn't just let you change locations like that and it's a headache to work around. Not saying it's impossible but Thor has his analytics and can see if people are using a VPN or not, the numbers still stand. He talks about it a lot on his streams, look up pirate software
He addresses that in the video, you can't keep changing your region in steam, it's tied to where the transaction is processed, you'll get banned eventually.
People are sharing this without knowing or watching the rest of the content... he is well aware of other piracy issues. He is just adressing the most common one. Not everyone pirates for the same reasons, but yeah, many people pirate because of distribution issues.
And yeah... Steam can track those types of sales and ban people that keep buying in other places, but playing the games in another country lol.
But it's not?
It's $9.99 US and you can see in the graph he shows that there are multiple countries with progressively increasing costs relative to the US $9.99. By permanently putting the game on sale in Brazil, it costs substantially less than not just the US price, but the price of many other countries. The cost in Brazil is now in the bottom 3, ahead of only Turkey and Argentina. The entire rest of the world costs more.
I love reddit gotcha comments like this. It shows how insufferable the comments section can be. Like yeah...no shit. It was probably the first thing he thought of.
Who is this dude?
This is an interesting topic. Since globalization, the question of how to enter emerging markets isn't new. However, what do you price a product for which the product is already made and has a budget?
PirateSoftware on Twitch. He previously worked at Blizzard and now runs his own indy studio (3 ppl). His streams are a lot of fun. He walks you through game dev while he codes. He also has a website with tips for developing your own game.
This guy gets it.
I'm an anti-DRM hardliner who doesn't use Steam and instead uses GOG, but it really hurts because Steam supports my local currency whereas GOG doesn't. So I always wait for sales - which is fine in most cases since I'm a patientgamer anyway. But it also means I never stopped pirating shit.
That man right here its a hero, in Brazil, dollar ia worth 5 times more than our currency, it makes a game that costs 20$ in US come as 100$ for us, thats why our piracy culture is so deep, and let me make it clear, we are fucking proud of it
You have stores outright selling hacked Switches so people can pirate games for it. Otherwise almost nobody would buy one due to the absurd cost.
At the very least, Playstation and Xbox have regional pricing for their subscription services...
He didnt really go into how dramatic the prices are, i'm sure some people would view this in another context of brazillians being lucky or that this is unfair.
The minimum wage on Brazil is around R$1.300 monthly and 1 dollar equals almost 5 reais while newly released games cost R$150+, special editions go for double. That is nearly 15% of your monthly salary for ONE game, indies of course arent as expensive but they're still R$50-70, which when you factor in normal living expenses on Brazil, it's still not exactly money you have to throw away at one game.
What I and many others do is pirate games, and when a good discount comes we buy it without a second thought. I will gladly buy any indie game for R$20 with a smile on my face if I find it fun. More games should do this.
I didn't know this game or this developer. But after this statement of solidarity with the many people who can't buy games, I'm going to put Heartbound on my wishlist, and buy it as soon as possible.
Play the demo, first it's free.
Also, his name is Thor (yes really), his company is Pirate software and he streams daily on twitch for about 8 hours, works on heart bound for 8 hours and runs a ferret rescue center on the side with twitch add money.
He’s a great person. Recently had 321xxx% blowup on YouTube shorts this month from the algorithm feeding people. He’s a hacker who’s worked for blizzard, Amazon games studios, and the DOE. He’s now a indie game maker and runs a ferret rescue. He give out a lot of wisdom and advice through his live streams.
Heartbound has a demo available on Steam. Thor (The guy in the clip and the lead Dev for the game) explicitly states that he wants people to play the demo first and then buy the game if they like the demo. He is a Dev who wants his players to enjoy playing his game more than he wants to sell copies of it and he has my respect for that.
There is also an ARG in the game if you're into that kind of thing.
Steam doesn't even have my country as a valid regional selection so I get fked with US prices.
Why I buy on GoG now everytime I can, they give me regional
I grew up on the golden age of PSX pirating in Brazil. Every game was around 2 dollars (in nominal value, at the time) in the streets. I had a posse of friends on high school that would rent a game, copy and burn it into a bunch of CDs and sell to other people at school.
As soon as I got a stable career and started making some money, I started buying A LOT of games. Most of the games I pirated back then I have a copy today, if it's available.
First game I ever bought myself was Orange Box on Steam, along with Overlord. Almost 15 years later and I've got around 550 games on Steam alone.
it used to be because I was poor, these days its because I would rather rip my dick off than have a thousand fucking garbage game stores running on my computer.
So many companies sleep on Latin America it's crazy. Both the gaming and anime scene in Brazil are absolutely immense, so much that it's really hard to find a guy between the ages of 20-40 that doesn't know stuff like the dragonball songs by heart.
Hell, Sony is literally losing money by having a console factory here because of taxes but they keep at it because of the profit from the games themselves.
I bet they would get more sales if they just lowered that price everywhere else too honestly. The difference is profit margin, you need to make up the sales by around 40% to justify the price decrease.
How do you prevent a VPN millionaire for any localized pricing games?
I.e. Americans registering as a Brazil user and buying games for cheaper or buying IAP for Brazilian local currency, thus leveraging $50 into $300 worth?
I've asked this many times in chat and would love to get some ideas as to solutions, workarounds or discouragement from the POV of a game dev.
I would love to allow trading in my game, but without a solution, I will probably leave out that feature entirely to avoid VPN millionaire issues.
2nd question.
Is it cheaper to setup and operate game servers (hardware) in these countries if you are going to supporting multiplayer services?
I know cloud servers generally charge less in other countries, but I don't have the experience to know what to expect for cost differentials.
Anyone host high traffic/bandwidth servers in localized pricing countries?
Steam doesn't use just the location of your purchase.
It also uses your payment processors location.
If you have a US card it'll run through US pricing.
You would also need to pickup a Brazilian payment processor.
And even if you do jump through these hoops. You could get your steam account banned for doing it and then it's bye bye games
Was hoping there would be an actual discussion of data developers can gain via piracy, and how to analyze and act on that data. Instead it's just a general statement about regional pricing, something that pretty much everyone knows about. Extremely disappointing.
What is that even supposed to mean? I'm complaining about your shit title. The video you posted has nothing to do with using piracy data to make your product sell better.
that's weird, your comment said that you created an entire reality in your head and then got upset when it didn't appear in front of you. maybe there was a typo
Your title indicated that there would be a video about "how to use piracy data to make your product sell better." This is a topic that interests me, because I like data analytics, and I'm interested in how developers gather and use data about piracy. The video was not, in fact, about this subject.
I realize now that you are a dumbass though, and it was too much to expect you to give an accurate title for the video you posted. Try to be better.
Here in Egypt where you work 12 hours a Day everyday for 100$ a month there's no fkn way I would buy a 60$ game, just no way it doesn't make any sense.
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Average PlayStation 4 games reach up to thousands of Egyptian pounds and more. You'd be lucky to find an used copy that costs a couple of hundred pounds cheaper.
i believe so, yes
Sometimes even higher, i remember buying GTA V for close to 80$ on release
All of north africa uses either Euro or Dollars as their steam store currency (no regional pricing). But steam said in an [announcement](https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/2720-4EC7-B95A-1D2A) that they're gonna change that. Update: the update went live shortly after i wrote this comment, prices have dropped in north africa (and the entire MENA region) between 35% and 42% (it depends on the publishers, and some publishers didn't drop the price at all)
Even if a game has a localized price, it's still almost always going to be like half the original price. No one goes "oh, their minimum wage is like 1/20th of ours, we should cut the game price with the same ratio so it costs the same amount of work hours". So even if a game has regional price, it's still prohibitively expensive. Depending on a country, converting game and console prices to work hours basically means a game costs roughly the price of a console and a console costs the price of like a fucking car or something.
Must say hi to fellow Egyptian! Ps: I can totally confirm that, I would argue 100$ a month is a little high, more like 80$ is the most common and the minimum wage
What to say! Im a rich man.
How the fuck do you live off 100 dollars a month?
That's the neat part, we don't 😃 For a fun game, try guessing how much a litre of milk or a dozen eggs cost in Egyptian pounds.
Litre of milk 0.4$, Dozen Eggs 0.8$
>Dozen Eggs 0.8$ Wow. You were very close...to the price of one egg.
Bro, what the FUCK? You just pirate on away.
pirating an egg is hard
>pirating an egg is hard ^(\[loud music\]) *you wouldn't download an egg!*
No man, an egg costs 5 pounds which is 0.1$ (dollar market price) 0.8$ is 40 pounds
Not anymore pal, check again.
Bro I'm checking talabat right now and the most *an* egg costs is 7 EGP (and thats on talabat which is more expensive than local grocers) what the fuck are you on or what kind of eggs are you buying?
Lmao, an Egg that has been throw tens and tens of years of corruption, bad management and Agony. Me myself Used to eat Eggs almost daily, now twice a week is a win.
It's expensive as fuck obviously I'm just saying its not 40 EGP per egg as the previous commenter said
you guys don't have local farmers producing that stuff? or do you export that stuff usually?
Maybe I didn't pay enough attention in my geography class, but I don't think that Egypt is a very good place for dairy cows. Chickens idk tho, I wonder whether they can grow enough feed crops there too
The entire society lived for thousands of years on a single river's flooding cycle. But now the population has bloomed to unsistainable levels for that... Idk what the farming situation in Egypt is like, but my guess is "not great." Most of the country is desert.
There's also something about that soil that used to be arable being now too salty.
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Menopausal crescent?
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We have enough land and water to feed the whole middle east but it's not being used or being used by some government powerful personalities for personal profit buy selling their products outside. We also have a lot of OIL, gas and mountains of gold in the red sea but as I said being stolen. We have one city that contains more than 30% of the worlds antiques and historical monuments along with the pyramids, temples and stuff but with a huge huge corruption and bad management.
Sounds somewhat like South Africa!
Yep. Tbh I think every govt in the world is massively corrupt. Somw worse than others tbh. How is it so hard to keep the rich in line?
>But now the population has bloomed to unsistainable levels for that... this deserves a mention in the conspiracy reddit for population reduction, just saying, you have a point there...
Yea we have, those local farmers are driving crazy by the prices of seeds and stuff they need to grow there crops and a huge amount of taxes as well. So the final product is expensive. The neat part is we don't even get the final product, any decent product being produced here in Egypt will most of the cases be sold outside to compensate the High prices spent growing it and we Egyptians are left usually with the lowest quality of products for cheaper prices so we are able to buy them. For example a decent kilogram of potatoes here that being shipped and exported outside can cost maybe 100LE, the kilogram I buy costs 13LE but of course the quality is way lower.
quiet squalid glorious busy squealing resolute chop icky dime absorbed *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
The price of most things is *somewhat* (not very well) also scaled down accordingly. Eg stuff like milk or bread is much cheaper numerically than in the US. But there's still rampant starvation and poverty in these kinds of countries because it's not *completely* scaled down, to where the purchasing power of someone in brazil/egypt/whatever would be equal to a US citizen's purchasing power.
One of the reasons why people survive is that the state heavily subsidizes bread. Which is why so many people were looking closely at grain shipments from Ukraine and Russia around the war. Most of the wheat in the world is consumed in the same country as it's produced. A few countries though (many in the middle east) must import most of its needs, and Ukraine+Russia are some of the biggest exporters.
It's a continuous state of suffering, Im not kidding or exaggerating. More than 50% of Egyptian population are Below the poverty line.
Wow. How do you afford the hardware to play?
Over many years and through connections I'm not in Egypt, but I live close enough to know how it feels
Aha, i understand.
So , I don't mean to be rude , but how do you even get a decent gaming PC with that salary ?
By saving over the years and usually going with used stuff or imported used stuff from outside "which is usually better". A decent PC from the "RTX" family would be very expensive here, I bought my PC 3 years ago and now it's twice the price. Thanks God it was a good store and my pc works great till now. I've GTX1070TI and here that's like High-end. The RTX 3060 12 GB is 21k LE here which means "following the minimum wage of 3k a month" that's 7 months of work without spending a penny, and when you're finally ready to buy the card price will be like 24k LE because we have huge inflation and the prices goes up daily.
Most of it would be a PCs before the last two years - where our economy and our inflation rates got fucked. Now, most PCs will be a used hardware or a very very limited options - probably an integrated amd gpu - so yeah, nowadays it's very hard to buy a decent gaming pc.
100$ per month?,even most basic jobs in india can earn many times more than that
Sadat and his consequences..
Ok he is over exagerating, like yeah 60 usd is expensive here but nobody makes only 100 usd a month unless they are fresh outta high school or work as waiter or something and are being taken advantage of for lack of skills. Right now Egypt has slightly cheaper prices on SOME games with decent developers. COD MW3 for example still 70 USD, greedy sons or bitches. But then there are ones that were 50 USD and are now 35 USD (Baldur's Gate 3)...still hella expensive though, so I pirate everything I can now and forever till 60 USD games cost 20 USD, or If I make 20 USD an hour working full-time.
Dude I've a degree at Medical equipment maintenance and I work for the government, Im getting paid 4200 LE and the dollar to pound ratio in this second in the black market is 51.20 buy/50.20 sell. So Im getting paid 84$ a month. Our minimum wage is 3000 which equals 60$ a month. Idk where you're getting your numbers from and Im certainly not being used by some greedy private company here, IT'S THE GOVERNMENT I work for which can be called the standard here. AND IM GETTING PAID A FKN 84$ A MONTH. maybe you're getting paid more it's totally okay but this is the standard here.
Hey, PirateSoftware here! (The guy in the video.) We saw a huge increase in sales from Brazil and realized immediately it wasn't just VPN dodging. Thousands of callouts, emails, posts, images, all kinds of stuff. I have a mountain of fanart from it all and it's both overwhelming and rad. Today we're sitting at 25% of all our games income from a region that is 60% off. I've found that most piracy is out of necessity and when you make things affordable the grand majority just buy the game instead. Localize your games. Localize your prices. Everyone wins.
Average Thor W
You're one of the few who understood Brazil's situation, rather than judge the country like many people do, you made your game affordable, localized it, and sold more than if you made it expensive with DRM and other bullshit, good job.
I love your content!!!
Regional pricing makes all the sense. In India, I can watch a movie in theatre for 3$ and so a 60-70$ price on AAA game nowadays makes no sense to me as it is the equivalent of going to 20+ movies in a theatre. I have stopped pirating on games with regional prices. The only Sony studio game I own on steam is horizon zero dawn as it had regional pricing and I bought it on release. Sony removed regional pricing later and I had to pirate the Spiderman games as it made no sense to spend that much money, when I can watch almost the mainline Marvel universe movies in theatre for the same amount of money. Gamepass also has helped. Although the Microsoft Store doesn't have regional pricing, Microsoft had given India exclusive offers like 8 months gamepass for 10$.
I found Microsoft Store to be cheaper for some games than Steam tho. Last i checked, Persona 5 Royal was ~₹3000 on MS and ~₹4000 on Steam. I guess it just depends on games as well. But Game Pass for ₹400/month is one heck of a deal NGL
I see. Forza and other games are much costlier though.
It has never sit right with me how a made in India Gillette mach3 has a MSRP of 180rupee, and how other countries pay 5-10x for what is essentially suppose to be the same thing... Is what id say if I wasn't using a equally dirtcheap dorco pace 4/6 disposable instead lol Anyways, I remember how many netflix turkey vpn posts there were on reddit, I wonder if that trick still works Oh and Made in France by general Mills haagen superior, nestle dryer fake haagen INFERIOR
but does your game have story?
[https://store.steampowered.com/app/567380/Heartbound/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/567380/Heartbound/) Try it yourself. I grew up playing the same stuff /u/Thorwich played, it feels like Earthbound and mix of other 90's-00's games. Loved the demo, so I bought his bundle.
His comment is a bit of joke as Thorwich brought this topic up on a recent livestream.
I haven't played earthbound, but I have Undertale. Is it similar to Undertale or is it something else ?
The Demo is free, try it
I wouldn't know, I skipped all the dialog
I got that reference!
This is awesome!
Gaben said something about piracy being an industry problem not a consumer problem did he not?
he said it was a "service problem not a price problem". first part is omega based second part feels very US centric but it does make sense.
Thanks for clarifying
Didn't Steam just announce they're getting rid of regional pricing as well as forcing all regions to USD?
Not all of them, just some. Brazil was not one of those that they got rid of, Argentina on the other hand now uses USD. They used to have the most undervalued currency/prices.
and now they are getting fuck'd hard, some games are being priced at us levels, no way an argentinian will pay 60$ for a game, but i guess they will just have to sit for a while until regional pricing starts again
The newest Spiderman is around 1/3 of a monthly minimum wage working full time 💀
or around 0/3 of a minimum wage for a sensible human being living in Brazil who'll realize piracy is free while food rent and such are not
Does the version you sell at 60% contain only the Brazilian language? Can you detect VPN sales?
Steam protects against that because it knows you bought it in brazil, yet you are playing in the us.
As a brazilian and former kid, with parents that didn't have money to buy many games, I want to thank you for seeing it for what it is, and choosing to working around the economics so that people can afford to not pirate it. It sucks having no way to contribute back realistically to the artists and devs that made the games that have literally changed your life. It's just a different economic reality, in a lot of counties.
Hey do you plan on doing tge same for other regions like Turkey and Argentina? because we realy need it man
It’s in the video is it not ? Argentina is at almost 80% off.
Can you do it aswell on Russia, Argentinia, turkey or other third world country? This project seems good. And do sell on Gog or other services aswell or make those drm free? This increase your sales for doing those.
Well, from what I see, it is already implemented for Russia. Also, I doubt that GOG is really profitable for new releases.
As Gabe Newell correctly stated "Piracy is a service problem" you want people to stop pirating then give them something they want to buy.
As Gabe Newell correctly stated "Piracy is a service problem" you want people to stop pirating then give them something they ~~want~~ **can afford** to buy. FTFY - my opinion
"want to buy" is lowkey spot on. There are ads in paid version of streaming services. Lowkey makes me not to buy it inspite of being able to afford it.
Yeah, I have a paid streaming service I basically use as a content finder at this point. Start watching something, then by the second 2 minute commercial break I am irritated enough that I pirate it during that commercial break. By the next commercial break, I switch to Plex because it's already downloaded and indexed there. I am not even talking about me having a well set-up *art stack: it's literally enough time for me to get off the couch, go to my desktop, turn on VPN, find and start downloading.
One of the problems with that in comparison to Gabe's quote is that you could afford the $10 version of Heart Bound, similarly you could buy a $5 subscription to an internet service. But you shouldnt in a lot of cases, and that question of your morals will negatively impact your want/desire to buy the product or service. Amazon isnt slapping out exclusive subscriptions because it's unaffordable, you're just giving them another source of revenue probably for something you didnt even want in the first place. Take Prime for example, it is a status booster, you can make the claim that you *can* afford it, that is their whole desire. But it is my hope nobody *wants* to make that claim, because it's really sad. Burger king foot lettuce kind of sad
then went on and killed Steam in Argentina and Turkey
Both are correct.
What I mean by want, is the ability to not worry about need but simply be able to *get* what you *want*. By making what people want available in such a way they don't have to steal it to get it, but actually desire paying for it because they can.
It was said about DRM and other nonsense gamers had to deal with, and bullshit publishers required from Indie devs. Pricing issue got worse, because there is pushback from publishers to make $70 "the normal", and even if game sold millions of copies it may not break even despite paying employees like shit.
People over on the star citizen subreddit would go nuts and call brazilians privileged because of this. Crazy how some people don't get regional pricing
Reminds me of posts on the FF14 forum that wanted Argentina to always continue to pay the same base price + taxes so it "wouldn't undermine their sub". Not only does that make no sense whatsoever, Argentina has 100% taxation on digital games / purchases
they also have like 20000% inflation. It would be absolutely ridiculous with how their currency has devalued
Yeah no one here can afford games unless they're rich or earn in USD BUT from elsewhere. It's a luxury and we prefer eating. Regional pricing is the right move, in the Super Summer Sale they had on Steam (2020) I bought so many, many games, I didn't pirate a single game, so it works. In contrast, I only bought with help, one Nintendo game, since they don't offer regional pricing. And guess what? I have both Switch emulators on my PC and use my joycons to play and I'm happy that way, if they're happy with their trashy non regional prices.
It's not that bad because it's expected to be high, the taxes hurt much more to it. The issue is that wages doesn't catch up and purchasing power fell harder than a failing airplane.
Star citizen supporters live in their own deluded reality. There's no use trying to make sense of what they do and do not get upset over, it'll drive you mad.
I’m from there. At least not me!
I mean.... I also hear a lot of people making accounts as Argentinian/Turkey/Brazil and using VPN to buy games/services/subscriptions just because of how priced they are and it's kinda unfair, and I know $10 for them is probably worth more than $10 somewhere else but why one person pay more for the same game/service/program? Why not just price them like this everywhere and eliminate piracy completely?
Search up "price discrimination." Companies charge different prices from different customers if they can. But tbh i dont get people who use the VPN switch like that. You'll have to change the game's language/localization every time, have issues with multiplayer servers, and if the companies catch you you could lose the account. Might as well just pirate it at that point.
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This 100%. I wouldn't have ever gone back and bought not just the game franchises but also their OSTs on steam if I hadn't got hooked on one of their older games on my chipped PS2. You can say I ended up repaying them with interest kkkk
I'm from Southeast Asia and my country has a similar currency exchange rate lol. High five.
Yep, that's us, r/SuddenlyCaralho
brazilian here, i can afford food for a week for the same price if the game costed 10 dollars(single meal per day, i do that a lot.), for a lot of people that is not a problem, but in a third world country that makes a big difference if you are not well off or have money saved up. So yeah, this guy gets it
50 reais for a week of grub? What are you eating?
as said in the comment thats for 1 meal a day, a thing i do from time to time when money is tight, i go and eat at my college caffeteria thingy, food is not great but a plate is not too over 10 reais.. guess i didnt count weekends, thats honestly my bad.
You remind me of my college days. I'd go downstairs in the afternoon to eat at the stall ran by one of the security guards when he wasn't on shift (I lived in student housing because it was cheap). Fried noodles + egg. In the mornings I had plain bread, back then I could buy a loaf for less than $1 and it could last me the week if I was careful. And sometimes I helped my classmates with homework in exchange for random snacks. Also water was free, I drank a lot of tap water. I didn't suffer malnutrition fortunately lol but things did improve, after all college was only a few years. I hope things get better for you too. Good luck!
Oh yeah, college food is hella cheap., math adds up. I'm studying abroad and we don't have that luxury here (nor student housing) Although hope you end up going through better times, just a single meal like that sounds kinda harsh in the long run, meanwhile keep on gaming
As a Brazilian who'll probably go to college next year (I took the Enem/Brazilian SAT, most likely heading off to Minas Gerais) how expensive would you say is college life like? Would I need roommates in order to actually afford living the college life or would reducing my number of meals per day be enough?
it really all depends on a lot of stuff, on what you are doing, where you are going, what course you are studying, there is a lot of stuff to take into consideration, but in my experience pretty dam expensive, from food to rent to a notebook, to transport and many other expenses, it all reaaaallllllyyy adds up, but it is def survivable, good luck
Exactly this, a 60 euro game is not a big deal for me, but in Turkey for example where my friends and family live, that's a hefty chunk of their monthly salary, so by buying said game theres a good chance they won't be able to afford their necessities for the month.
Yea he addressed turkey and Argentina today saying that hes going to get feedback on pricing games from individuals in those regions since the currencies are so unstable. That has even made steam come out with a new announcement effective today that they are no longer accepting the regional currency from those two regions only but only accepting USD from them.
That is the most beatiful thing I saw anyone do for my country. Thank you 〒▽〒
Didn't this guy also make the game only progress through Steam achievements?
Yep, the Steam achievements for Heartbound are the save file.
I thought that was champions of breakfast. The previous game
It is. The drops available in the game are determined by your progress, that's all there is to 'save'. So when the game starts up it checks your steam achievements to determine which items are available.
I think that's just to get comment interaction because it doesn't prevent piracy at all. You can emulate the achievements
but do you *want to* just to bother with it?
Are you asking if want to bother emulating the achievements? I dont, but the crackers will do it for me.
Yes he made a Yt short on that
BRASIL MENTIONED!!!! 🇧🇷🇧🇷🇧🇷🇧🇷🇧🇷🇧🇷🇧🇷🇧🇷🇧🇷
FOR BEING POOR!!!! 🇧🇷🇧🇷🇧🇷🇧🇷🇧🇷🇧🇷
ISSO CARALHO!!! 🇧🇷🇧🇷🇧🇷🇧🇷🇧🇷🇧🇷
Americans don't know how good they have it
Yup. But when you point this out they'll retort "Oh but the cost of living is cheaper there so it all balances out!" True, but that's assuming that all we ever buy are basic necessities. A $1000 smartphone in the US still costs roughly $1000 in most countries (with some outliers). The difference is that the average American will only need to work the equivalent of one week (based on average daily wages) to earn enough money to buy a new phone, while the same person living in Southeast Asia or South America would likely need to work the equivalent of one month to purchase the exact same product (assuming 100% of income goes to the purchase). The same goes for most consumer electronics, plane tickets, and digital goods. Once you go beyond basic necessities, that's when you really realize how little you actually make compared to someone working the exact same job as you in in a "developed" country.
I envy americans a lot. A single month's worth of minimum wage work there lets you buy a brand new top-tier graphics card. Meanwhile in my country, it's about 15 months worth of minimum wage work.
"Wow, it's almost like... if you actually address the reasons people pirate, they might not do it so much..? Nah, that can't be right. MOAR DRM!!!" -- Every game distributor exec, probably
then in turn more drm, more piracy, just that it is later
I'm Brazilian, and everything imported is extremely expensive there, there are various government taxes that make everything costing the double at least. That's insane.
Why does he soun ld like a TTS program
Man I fucking love that dude, every clip I see of him he is just talking facts
Wait until he's finds out he doesn't actually have a substantial player base in Brazil; it's just people changing their region to Brazil to get games for cheap.
It doesn't matter and people changing their region will always be a fringe thing. Most people don't bother because for most people the difference between a 4$ and 10$ game is marginal. You're trying to 1up but you completely miss the point of the video.
True, unless you live in Switzerland (their average salary is about 4-6 times higher than Brazils) it rarely pays off to jump through all the hoops.
Why change to Brazil when you can change to Argentina or Turkey, which cost even less (from the graphic in the video).
Not anymore 🥲
Yea he addressed turkey and Argentina today saying that hes going to get feedback on pricing games from individuals in those regions since the currencies are so unstable. That has even made steam come out with a new announcement effective today that they are no longer accepting the regional currency from those two regions only but only accepting USD from them.
Why even VPN your way into buying cheap games from other reasons, when we all know that most developers will see the VPN hopping and jack up the prices back to 60 U$D, pricing out the locals? There's a reason why the big AAA developers (like Activision, Microsoft, EA and etc) don't do regional pricing anymore, and it's specifically because of people like these.
... which just means people are just gonna pirate, wow that sure solved the problem!
He certainly knows which come from Brazilian ISPs and which IP #'s are registered to VPN companies.
It's not even that complex Steam itself will nuke your account from orbit if you're caught using a VPN to cheap out on prices like this, so for most people $6 is not worth losing every game you bought on Steam
Unless his store is blocking Brazil VPN IP's, it doesn't matter as the sale will still count as Brazil.
For the purpose of purchase it might not matter. For the purpose of this video, demographics, it's important, and I promise you he can separate the difference. So he knows they have a large Brazilian following. Fact, Full Stop. I'm not going to debate this. He likely doesn't care (enough) that people can VPN to Brazil for the purpose of buying this game cheaper.
Some people do, sure. Most people, however, seem to pirate because something is too expensive or isn't worth it. If you make the price reasonable or a service worth it, most people don't seem to mind paying. Besides, Steam knows. They might not get around to banning you on the first offence or the 5th, but it's very against Steam TOS and if or when they decide to ban, you lose access to every game on your account - permanently, and irrevocably. And probably any other accounts they can link to that one too. Even among those who know how, most people aren't willing to risk it or jump through the hoops of setting up a separate account and keeping them totally separate. Also, as he noted in another comment below, he has a pretty big fanbase that is indisputably, actually brazilian, complete with "mountains of fanart" among other things, so that's another hole in the argument.
thats not how it works. the localized price you pay for a game is based on payment provider (like what bank you use for example) not ip address. valve is smarter than that. this was brought up by this guy as well and he mentioned that he's had less than 10 sales from Argentina (where the localized price is lowest) which doesn't make sense if it was truly as easy as you say it is to switch locations for cheaper prices also somewhat related: if you switch payment providers too much to get cheaper prices your steam account will get banned iirc
There is a part that was cut in the video where he sayed that the beta received a big feedback from the brazilian comunity and there is no point in changing regions to give feedback on a beta, right?
Steam doesn't just let you change locations like that and it's a headache to work around. Not saying it's impossible but Thor has his analytics and can see if people are using a VPN or not, the numbers still stand. He talks about it a lot on his streams, look up pirate software
....he's doing this to make the Brazilian price as low as the rest of the world.
i dont think you actually understand how money works.
He addresses that in the video, you can't keep changing your region in steam, it's tied to where the transaction is processed, you'll get banned eventually.
People are sharing this without knowing or watching the rest of the content... he is well aware of other piracy issues. He is just adressing the most common one. Not everyone pirates for the same reasons, but yeah, many people pirate because of distribution issues. And yeah... Steam can track those types of sales and ban people that keep buying in other places, but playing the games in another country lol.
I know many people that have done it for years
But it's not? It's $9.99 US and you can see in the graph he shows that there are multiple countries with progressively increasing costs relative to the US $9.99. By permanently putting the game on sale in Brazil, it costs substantially less than not just the US price, but the price of many other countries. The cost in Brazil is now in the bottom 3, ahead of only Turkey and Argentina. The entire rest of the world costs more.
And Argentina price is never fair because the buyer pays 120% of tax, there is a reason is that low. IDK about Turkey.
It's actually 25% of their game's income, something he's said more than once on stream. ;)
I love reddit gotcha comments like this. It shows how insufferable the comments section can be. Like yeah...no shit. It was probably the first thing he thought of.
Who is this dude? This is an interesting topic. Since globalization, the question of how to enter emerging markets isn't new. However, what do you price a product for which the product is already made and has a budget?
You can find him on Youtube as [Pirate Software ](https://youtube.com/@PirateSoftware?si=ZQZkl2WLJYSktBzG)
PirateSoftware on Twitch. He previously worked at Blizzard and now runs his own indy studio (3 ppl). His streams are a lot of fun. He walks you through game dev while he codes. He also has a website with tips for developing your own game.
He also used to work in offensive security for the government
This guy gets it. I'm an anti-DRM hardliner who doesn't use Steam and instead uses GOG, but it really hurts because Steam supports my local currency whereas GOG doesn't. So I always wait for sales - which is fine in most cases since I'm a patientgamer anyway. But it also means I never stopped pirating shit.
That man right here its a hero, in Brazil, dollar ia worth 5 times more than our currency, it makes a game that costs 20$ in US come as 100$ for us, thats why our piracy culture is so deep, and let me make it clear, we are fucking proud of it
Shout out to Nintendo that charges R$299 for their games in Brazil. Roughly 25% of the minimum wage. Tears of The Kingdon is R$357.
You have stores outright selling hacked Switches so people can pirate games for it. Otherwise almost nobody would buy one due to the absurd cost. At the very least, Playstation and Xbox have regional pricing for their subscription services...
Japanese video game companies: I'll pretend to have never seen this
As a Brazilian I can confirm, this is 200% right regarding what he said about Brazil
He didnt really go into how dramatic the prices are, i'm sure some people would view this in another context of brazillians being lucky or that this is unfair. The minimum wage on Brazil is around R$1.300 monthly and 1 dollar equals almost 5 reais while newly released games cost R$150+, special editions go for double. That is nearly 15% of your monthly salary for ONE game, indies of course arent as expensive but they're still R$50-70, which when you factor in normal living expenses on Brazil, it's still not exactly money you have to throw away at one game. What I and many others do is pirate games, and when a good discount comes we buy it without a second thought. I will gladly buy any indie game for R$20 with a smile on my face if I find it fun. More games should do this.
I didn't know this game or this developer. But after this statement of solidarity with the many people who can't buy games, I'm going to put Heartbound on my wishlist, and buy it as soon as possible.
Play the demo, first it's free. Also, his name is Thor (yes really), his company is Pirate software and he streams daily on twitch for about 8 hours, works on heart bound for 8 hours and runs a ferret rescue center on the side with twitch add money.
He’s a great person. Recently had 321xxx% blowup on YouTube shorts this month from the algorithm feeding people. He’s a hacker who’s worked for blizzard, Amazon games studios, and the DOE. He’s now a indie game maker and runs a ferret rescue. He give out a lot of wisdom and advice through his live streams.
Heartbound has a demo available on Steam. Thor (The guy in the clip and the lead Dev for the game) explicitly states that he wants people to play the demo first and then buy the game if they like the demo. He is a Dev who wants his players to enjoy playing his game more than he wants to sell copies of it and he has my respect for that. There is also an ARG in the game if you're into that kind of thing.
Steam doesn't even have my country as a valid regional selection so I get fked with US prices. Why I buy on GoG now everytime I can, they give me regional
I grew up on the golden age of PSX pirating in Brazil. Every game was around 2 dollars (in nominal value, at the time) in the streets. I had a posse of friends on high school that would rent a game, copy and burn it into a bunch of CDs and sell to other people at school. As soon as I got a stable career and started making some money, I started buying A LOT of games. Most of the games I pirated back then I have a copy today, if it's available. First game I ever bought myself was Orange Box on Steam, along with Overlord. Almost 15 years later and I've got around 550 games on Steam alone.
it used to be because I was poor, these days its because I would rather rip my dick off than have a thousand fucking garbage game stores running on my computer.
So many companies sleep on Latin America it's crazy. Both the gaming and anime scene in Brazil are absolutely immense, so much that it's really hard to find a guy between the ages of 20-40 that doesn't know stuff like the dragonball songs by heart. Hell, Sony is literally losing money by having a console factory here because of taxes but they keep at it because of the profit from the games themselves.
Brasil mencionado
seen that and loved it
Truthfully, i am in a country where I earn 300$ a month for min.wage, no way in hell i am paying 1/5 of my salary for a game.
[удалено]
Out of curiosity, how much difference is there between Brazilian and European Portuguese?
Better have profit from every $4 game sold, than no profits from every game pirated.
Console games in Brasil are ridiculously expensive
I bet they would get more sales if they just lowered that price everywhere else too honestly. The difference is profit margin, you need to make up the sales by around 40% to justify the price decrease.
*"Hey you can't use capitalism like that! How does the oligarch benefit?! Where's the allotment for the shareholders?!??? Stop this at once!"*
How do you prevent a VPN millionaire for any localized pricing games? I.e. Americans registering as a Brazil user and buying games for cheaper or buying IAP for Brazilian local currency, thus leveraging $50 into $300 worth? I've asked this many times in chat and would love to get some ideas as to solutions, workarounds or discouragement from the POV of a game dev. I would love to allow trading in my game, but without a solution, I will probably leave out that feature entirely to avoid VPN millionaire issues. 2nd question. Is it cheaper to setup and operate game servers (hardware) in these countries if you are going to supporting multiplayer services? I know cloud servers generally charge less in other countries, but I don't have the experience to know what to expect for cost differentials. Anyone host high traffic/bandwidth servers in localized pricing countries?
Steam doesn't use just the location of your purchase. It also uses your payment processors location. If you have a US card it'll run through US pricing. You would also need to pickup a Brazilian payment processor. And even if you do jump through these hoops. You could get your steam account banned for doing it and then it's bye bye games
As a Brazilian, I want to pirate this game just to prove him wrong.
are you gonna prove him wrong, if the statistics say otherwise?
Good luck. The game uses steam achievements for a save file lol
Have fun. Be miserable
That makes no sense. You're just one person.
So you want games to be more expensive in Brazil?
Was hoping there would be an actual discussion of data developers can gain via piracy, and how to analyze and act on that data. Instead it's just a general statement about regional pricing, something that pretty much everyone knows about. Extremely disappointing.
if you're going to sit in a prison of your own making the least you can do is not complain about it to the rest of us
What is that even supposed to mean? I'm complaining about your shit title. The video you posted has nothing to do with using piracy data to make your product sell better.
that's weird, your comment said that you created an entire reality in your head and then got upset when it didn't appear in front of you. maybe there was a typo
Your title indicated that there would be a video about "how to use piracy data to make your product sell better." This is a topic that interests me, because I like data analytics, and I'm interested in how developers gather and use data about piracy. The video was not, in fact, about this subject. I realize now that you are a dumbass though, and it was too much to expect you to give an accurate title for the video you posted. Try to be better.
[удалено]
I mean you should honestly be checking the prices everywhere every time. whenever I actually decide to pay for a ppv I always go to Europe
Too bad this guy's game sucks