Post by Cavalary in Translating itch.io

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You may consider this off topic, but since it was mentioned in the OP, just wanted to ask to please NOT add regional pricing. It's an absolutely rotten industry practice, charging people differently depending on which lines on a map some bits go to. Some may argue for regional discounts for some countries, and I guess it could be tolerable if they choose to make their work more affordable there, but there's no way to do even that properly, since there are plenty of poor countries not getting discounts, or getting lower ones than better off countries, and there are also lots of poor people even in countries considered wealthy. But more importantly, overcharging (compared to the standard price, generally considered to be the US one) any country is of course way worse, even more so when you have that standard model of EUR = USD for EU countries, including those not using the Euro, even the poorest ones.

Since you support multiple currencies and developers can set the price in the one they choose, it'd be nice for the customer to be able to pay in their currency of choice if among the supported ones, at the current exchange rate, but other than that, or if even this would for some reason imply actual regional pricing, please don't. Now with GOG even removing their "fair price package", five years after deciding to allow regional pricing after having "one world, one price" as the 2nd clear, specific pillar of their mission statement for the first 5.5 years of their existence, as far as I know it's just you and Zoom that still push back against this (even if without making a point of it)...

Would be a very good thing to support more payment methods though, including as part of a localization effort, as there are various ones that are popular in certain countries. And starting with prepaid cards, like Paysafecard (or something else if equally widely available, that's the one I know of, and use for any such purchases, so can't make any here yet...).

Hope this wasn't too much of an off-topic rant...

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leafoAdmin5 years ago (1 edit) (+2)

Thanks for the feedback. Adding support for showing a purchase flow in a local currency is a high priority for us. That is tied very closely to regional pricing though, we bucket currencies and regions together when we talk about the regional pricing project. In any case, the pricing configuration will be up to the creators, so we won't be forcing any pricing scheme on anyone for the foreseeable future. (unless we learn that some kind of automatic currency exchange for showing localized prices helps conversion a lot, then we'll probably automate that)

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Cavalary5 years ago(+3)

If you won't force flat pricing anymore, they'll go with the rotten "industry standard" as they do everywhere else... :(

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Wasted Audio179 days ago

Can you explain what you think is “rotten” about this?

Purchasing power is objectively different in other regions, but you want to force people with low income to pay significantly higher prices? (in some cases orders of magnitude different)

I don’t get it.

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Cavalary178 days ago

*sigh* This same discussion every time.

People who oppose regional pricing refer to the regions that get HIGHER prices than the base (US) one, like the EU and EEA, including the poorer EU countries, sometimes even non-EU Serbia and Montenegro, AU/NZ, sometimes Japan... People who support it refer to the regions that get LOWER prices, like Latin America, former CIS states, China, where not banned Russia (for which massively lower pricing was initially introduced, not because of the purchasing power but to make legal purchases compete with the powerful Russian "piracy" market).

The thing about basing it on country is that you can't make it fair for the people. There are plenty of poor people in wealthier countries that are doubly harmed by it and some wealthy people in poor countries that doubly benefit. And even at country level, it's not fair overall, because it's not actually based on purchasing power, but on marketing and sales. For example most African countries generally don't get regional price cuts because publishers don't expect sales there anyway, so they just don't bother, even though if you'd base it on disposable income they should get the lowest prices.

Still, despite such differences remaining inherently unfair either way they're applied, I wouldn't personally complain if the regional pricing matrix would just have one maximum price that'd apply for all the wealthier countries (US/CA, Western and Northern Europe, AU/NZ, JP, probably South Korea), and either the same price or lower for the rest. But make sure that no non-wealthy country pays more than a wealthy one.

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Wasted Audio178 days ago (2 edits)

Of course within a country there are differences, but I don’t want to force people from a region where there are orders of magnitude different purchasing power to pay a relatively insane amount of money for my products.

I hope you understand that it doesn’t make any sense for those cases.

Calling this “rotten” makes you look like a heartless fool.

But sure I agree that this would need some proper tuning to apply correctly. It’s a good practice if applied sensibly, imo. And I believe that the current global flat rate is senseless.

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Cavalary177 days ago (2 edits)

Again, while still unfair, if you'd want to offer discounts to some regions, I wouldn't personally take a stand against it. But if you claim to do it for such reasons, you should strive to apply those discounts for all poorer regions, not "forget" about those that actually are the poorest, like I was saying about offering discounts to Latin America or China or the former CIS region but not to (most of) Africa or Southeast or Central Asia...

But what I really do take a stand against and call rotten is if you'd (also) want to apply the typical 1 USD (for US price) = 1 EUR (for EU price, even for non-Euro countries) rate, or similar price hikes for UK or AU/NZ, because there's no way to claim that the purchasing power there is far greater than that of the US (except in Luxembourg), and in most of the EU it's lower.

Edit: So an acceptable regional pricing scheme would involve a flat price for the wealthy countries, no possibility for regional pricing between them, and let's say we can define wealthy as above double the world average taken by purchasing power parity, which actually gets us at the moment to a round number of 30 countries, down to NZ, as per https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/gdp_per_capita_ppp/ And for any other countries you could set the price as a percentage of that base/maximum one, which percentage must not exceed 100%, and any price you set for one country automatically becomes the maximum one for those ranked below it. That should fully cover the cases you use to argue in favor of it, correct?

But it's not how typically it's done...

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Wasted Audio177 days ago

We don’t have to follow how it’s “typically” done. Of course the aim is to do it properly and actually reflects the intent to make our software accessible at comparable rates across the globe.

Right now my software is only accessible in wealthy countries, which is a shame.

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