Regional pricing is a lot more complex than it seems, and I doubt some dumb schmuck in customer support even understands anything beyond what's written in the FAQ. Can't blame him for not answering a question he can't answer..
Here's an interesting article on why games cost more in australia: http://www.kotaku.com.au/2010/11/why-do-videogames-cost-so-much/
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Yes, they help others navigate the complexities of multi-market pricing. Still not sure what your problem is.
It's not some evil plot to make games more expensive in your country.
There are a lot of factors that go into pricing, including taxes, import duties, legal compliance, as well as regional wealth, market expectations, and other concerns.
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I doubt it's irrational, it's probably more likely that the reasons are not particularly obvious, and as you don't know what those reasons are, you just don't understand
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Many publishers supply their own regional prices though.
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I doupt that you can get him fired because he is most likely to follow company rules and i doupt they are unaware of pricing errors but with global economics and different laws sometimes things can get complicated for a simple individual but i fell your pain bro and maybe one day things will change. Just to mention blizzard has great support and they actually help quickly and you can see they want to help i had problems at wow and after opening a ticket my problem was resolved within hours every time
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Valve has default conversion rates, but publishers can adjust price per currency and set overrides for regions and countries, if they want.
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Again you are missing the point what @madjoki stated. For you to blame Steam "Every" game on Steam for your country has to have that fixed same high ratio (no fluctuations) so that you can blame Steam for its suggested price.
But if you see lots of other titles discounted compared to US prices whereas some games which you like to buy most are not, then it is the developer/publisher who set the price high for you.
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if that was the case, Steam full-priced releases wouldn't be twice as expensive as boxed copies with Steam codes in my country
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It isn't common to set multiple prices per currency, so all euro-paying countries share same price.
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which is bullshit. A game comes out, and I can either pay 60€ on Stem or around 26€ for a boxed copy. Either way, I get a Steam key, and I end up costing Steam bandwidth. Because the prices are so stupid, Steam is losing money on me rather than making it, as it is strongly discouraging me from doing any purchases via Steam Store.
And when a game comes out and has no boxed release )like the new Homeworld) I am shit out of luck, but I will not pay - I'd rather wait over a year.
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can you give me an example of a game which costs 60€ on steam and 26€ boxed? and where do you live?
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50€* my mistake. For example, Wolfenstein: The New Order. On Steam, 50€. In my country, retail, is around 14€, and it was 26€ on release. Every full-priced release (except XCOM 2 and GTAV) is like that
I live in Poland
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Who was the local distributor on those? I have my tip.
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Never mind, I looked it up and my suspicion was confirmed. The Polish distributor for those was Cenega. This explains the half price.
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What's your point? Of course the distributor wouldn't be Valve.
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The distributor would be Bethesda in this case. The point is that 1C/Cenega has some insane contract on the stuff they distribute and they can sell it at prices rivalling Russian Steam store prices. This is what you enjoy in Poland too (although the keys they sell there are usually Poland-locked for Steam), because the same games here have a -20 to +15% price difference in game stores compared to Steam store. (For example, Wolfenstein: The New Order is now cheaper in retail, yet the Old Blood expansion disk costs the same in Steam and retail chains.) And AFAIK, even in Poland this kind of cheapness is only for games distributed by Cenega.
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No, Bethesda is the publisher, not distributor.
And no, non-Cenega games also are of the same price. All full-priced games are 120PLN. There are very few exceptions (GTAV, XCOM2 and Fallout 4). However, not that PLN has weakened, the prices are going up. Rise of the Tomb Raider released at 140PLN. Which is still nowhere near 50€.
No, these keys usually are not Poland-locked. Even if, it's Poland-Czech-Hungary
Old Blood is ccurrently 15€ in retail, but that's an expansion, not a full release, so the difference is smaller..
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Poland/Czech/Hungary is a Bethesda thing, I have zero idea why (especially considering that they never localise to Hungarian…). Here for us Bethesda was also the distributor that sold the games to the retailers.
Although strangely enough Cenega handles the budget category re-releases for them and UbiSoft for most other publishers (for example, I have EA games published by UbiSoft here).
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No, it's not just Bethesda thing. EA, Ubisoft, and others also do it.
Also, those are publishers, not distributors. Their name is on the box, yes, but it's not them that distribute the games.
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Yeah dont get mad at the support guy as he does exactly what he was told to. You should rather be mad at Valve because of their amount>quality attitude.
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OFF Topic Sorta...
Had a nightmare with Origin - please bring C&C games to steam and have them work unlike the crap origin puts out!
In a nutshell, Had two accounts, wanted to merge them... Authentication went as it should, games were transferred - 1 title was missed. Origin was unable to verify ownership of said title. Provided image of CD key card with serial numbers for ALL 5 games in that particular collection, was unable to authenticate because it was 22 digits not 16 or 20... "We can give you a digital copy of the game, but you have to provide, in addition to the CD keys, Images of the CD's AND a copy of the original purchase receipt"
Are you freaking kidding me? 1) who keeps receipts for games they bought 10+ years ago, 2) If I had the CD's, why would I want digital copies? 3) Why must I provide proof of ownership to what is (over the years) a 3rd copy of the game?
Eventually, and quickly, the matter was resolved with them giving me the ultimate collection for free once I found in my email the receipt for the title in question that they sent me back in September.
Nearly 3 hours down the shitter.
And as nice as it is to be gifted the ultimate collection, I remember reading off of the retail version that these 17 titles were supposed to work with modern PC's - do they? No, I have to waste even more time hunting around communities for guides and community made patches... Do you really think I want to play these games afterwards?
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It kinda reminds me of my "nightmare".
I have The Saboteur in retail, and wanted to take it to Origin. Support needed only 15 minutes to activate it on my acc, however then I found an old Battlefield 2 copy too. Its code was too old even for support members (!!!)
2 and a half hours later, I have already taken a photo from each possible angle, but finally, their "Code Verification Department" was able to verify it, so now I have Battlefield 2 Complete Edition on Origin :D
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As nice as it is to get a sweet bundle for your troubles, mouthwash still doesn't wash the bad taste away.
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Weird . When I wanted to bring my C&C games to Origin the entire procedure took 15 minutes, taking pictured included. They only wanted pictures. Everything went smoothly and they even threw in a little extra
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A few weeks ago, I looked through my old Support queries. I guess my english was a real horror to read around 5-6 years ago. However when a scam scam account, which added me to offer "the trade of my life" went haywire, and sent me a list of account names and passwords, I decided to write them a letter. They responded with a "What should I do if my PC is infected?" FAQ. I told them that my computer is fine. Then, after a month, a Support member closed the ticket, because my PC wasn't infected. GG
I actually have a really fortunate case to share with you too. Back when CoD BO was released, and my potato wasn't able to run it, I was looking through tweaks and stuff. I eventually found a YT video about a program, which only needed my Steam username and password. I was so dumb, that I typed it in, then NOD 32 told me, that it couldn't block an outgoing connection. Don't ask why, but I didn't feel the need, to change my password, so after a day, my account was hijacked. I wrote a letter to Steam Support, took pictures of all the CoDs I have bought in retail, and 3 days later, they have sent me a letter with a recovery password. Fortunately the guy only wanted to play Black Ops, so Valve didn't send my account on VACation :D
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I have to say I'm dissappointed with the start of your post.
"So I always thought contacting support is a waste of time in 95% of companies. No matter what issue you have, you'll sooner find a solution yourself (good or bad) than support will help you with it." With this attitude you're basically condemning yourself to a lifetime of bad support.
From professional experience I've had plenty of customers with this idea who fail to notice even when they get a good support employee on the other end. It's a lot better to take each encounter with a support-department at face-value: enter it with the mindset that it could be good or bad and just see what happens. Definitely works a lot better. Not every company is equally bad/good.
When it comes down to steam support: the support staff at Valve can't help it themselves. They're just doing what they are told to keep their jobs. Can't blame them. The problem lies with the higher managers. From what I've gathered unofficially they're basically employing too few people with too many support requests. Combine that with constantly checking their amount of supportrequests per hour because that needs to be skyhigh. It's a recipe for disaster. But that's just from the rumours I gather.
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unless your problem is something stupidly retarded that they clearly can do nothing about, probably have no knowledge of, and even if they did, probably wouldn't be allowed to discuss.
In that case, their job is to waste as little time as possible on your stupid question.
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You did not answer my question! WHY ARE THE GAMES TWICE EXPENSIVE THAN IN RUSSIA IF MY COUNTRY!?!
(please remember that as a Valve employee you cannot say anything that would put company in bad light, you cannot discuss contracts between Valve and publishers as those are confidential and of course you cannot alter pricing in any slightest way)
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You can ask them if they can forward your request to some financial manager.. I bet they do not have the authority to do so, I would say even this guys manager cannot escalate this high enough to make a change in pricing policy.
This is how Corporations work
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Contacted only one time steam support because some user revoked a game gift he traded me, showing that many other users were scammed that way, only to receive one copy pasta :/ (at least after 3 days and not weeks)
That said, steam support only helps when big money is the topic.
Don't care to write them if your problem isn't at least 100$ worth
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Tim?! That bastard! He always answers my tickets same as he did with you, so I asume is a bot. I've lost an account for that sucker Tim. Stupid support :c
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Well, I tried to add funds but the card was from U.S.A. (I'm from South America) and it gave me an error, so I wanted to ask about that and... The blocked my account for "fraudulen activities" but no transaction was made. Everytime I send a ticket Tim answers it with the exact same answer and says that they can't do anything. It would be nice if, you know, a danm person read the ticket.
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That's fucked up alright, but I don't know how to contact supervisors or managers
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That feeling when you enter random SG thread and even there ArchiBoT is mentioned.
Good, my plan is working, community slowly accepts his existence...
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Referring to the issue though, it's unlikely that you can do anything. Steam support is composed of bunch of monkeys pushing buttons which copy paste FAQ even if it doesn't make sense.
It's not those people fault, just Gaben not recruiting proper people to handle that stuff. They're most likely poor students from India, paid for lowest possible wage (if such even exists), and probably rewarded on per-ticket basis. If I ever found myself in such situation, when I had to do e.g. 100 tickets per hour, I'd most likely copy paste FAQ answers as well. You don't know if those people are even given OPPORTUNITY to help you, in fact it's Valve who tells them how to deal with customers. Remember that every employee has his own set of rules he must follow, and we really don't know how everything is handled there - the only thing we can see is that steam support is unhelpful piece of crap, not worth the time, handled by brainless monkeys. You can't know if it's in fact fault of the person you're interacting with - most likely not at all, it's the end result of company's policy.
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There are several issues valve needs to handle at the global level instead of requiring individual customers to raise tickets:
- the buy a game, dev changes game type to free, game auto-removed from your library, dev changes game back to non-free bug.
this has happened with a lot of games, to my knowledge they finally found a sort of fix with Snow by having separate steam ids for the free and paid versions.
at a global level they should compile a list of games that have free bounced, then cross reference with their sales DB and steam key redeem (3rd party sale) DB and restore the lost games to game owners. - review packages for games/dlc not flagged as owned when a package is purchased, flag them as owned for all package owners at the global level.
- some devs don't know how to patch, Painkiller Black is a good example many own it but the dev uploaded the patch as a new steamid so the patched version isn't available to many. Steam should consult with the dev, if it is a mistake like i think it is they should fix it for all owners, if on the other hand the Painkiller dev decided to pull something like the Metro dev did with the pay for patch thing then the new version should be re-branded ie Painkiller Black redux/2nded/redone/revisited/etc.
- customers who bought a game should have their purchases protected if a dev "burns it to the ground" where they delete the store page, free bounce, then delete the game files; or if they burn and reboot (devs sometimes do that to remove negative reviews or to hide that their game is bundle fodder)
- Steam should pretty much remove a devs ability to change what is in a package once that package has gone on sale. One of the types of burn and reboot a few devs have done involves emptying out a package deleting the store page for the package, making a new package under a new steam id with new store page, and import the stuff to the new package. end result is owners are left with a empty box.
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six. related to 5, Steam should review packages that have had changes (even packages no longer sold) and restore ownership of package contents as appropriate
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- This is probably the dev's responsibility, and it makes sense for it to be the dev's responsibility, but that means it's subject to the dev fucking up
- This is the dev's responsibility, and it's the dev who fucks up
- Steam should fucking blacklist devs who pull this shit
- that's too blunt a tool. For example, it would also stop devs from adding things to a package. But steam should fucking blacklist devs who take advantage of this
Basically, there should be a way to report devs from cheating, so they can be sent on a VACation.
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For Steam russia+cis not the same region. It's two different regions. And the price for cis higher than price for russia region.
Sorry for bad English
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i don't know. It's interesting question.
Steam defines my country in cis region. So prices are lower than prices in EU (but higher than russia's prices).
Maybe it's region locked so people in EU (or somewhere else) cannot get games with lower price. I think that's the point.
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I'm not talking about geographical position. I'm talking about European Union. I thought that all countries in EU have the same price in euros.
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Nope. EU2 region covers many non-EU countries too to boot.
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No, they're not. Poland aside we're all in the EU 2 region and have the exact same, high, prices that EU 1 has, despite the fact that we get paid 25-30% of what EU 1 gets paid. As someone already posted above, in many of our countries it's actually cheaper to buy retail copies of steam games than to buy them off the steam store.
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Sadly yes. But GOG does not really have AAA releases and most of it's titles can only be found in digital format, plus i'v already played at some point in my life the games i (re)buy from GOG, so i can just wait for a sale, and they have em pretty often.
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I was obviously talking about brand new AAA releases, you know, the ones that cost 50-60$, and i don't think they've had any of those besides their own Witcher series. Getting older AAA for 10-15$ is nothing really. Don't get me wrong, i have nothing against GOG, i love it and i'v always been pro-GOG around here, i'm just saying they mostly do the same thing Valve does when it comes to a lack of regional pricing.
As for region locks, i'v said it before when the subject was brought up, i would gladly live with region locks if it meant steam games, especially AAA releases would have realistic prices that take into account the economic realities of my country and of Eastern Europe in general.
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I took a look the other day, and it's not that simple. Some games cost more than russia, some less. Some games cost same as EU, some less.
For us mere mortals, region pricing is a mystery, but the truth is that it's a combination of different cost structures (taxes, import duties, censorship approval), market tolerance (piracy, cost of physical discs, local income), distribution issues (e.g. C1 exclusivity), and publisher's whimsy.
There are plenty of articles on the web that discuss or analyze the issues, but the end result is that it's just as much art as science, and there's not one single issue or party that can be identified and blamed.
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They tend to have distribution rights for most games in the entire area, so whatever they sell should be available to their potential customers.
The other is that entire Russian, Ukranian, and sometimes Chinese/SEA groups made a living from buying cheap Russian keys/games and selling them with an insane profit to Westerners. So it was also an incentive to lock their region down. Even double Russian prices are undercutting ROW by 20-33%.
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Uhm, few? They have over 50% share of the CIS video game market…
Logical… well, yes. Then again, trying to make Russia's SW market (which is still over 90% pirated) go white is a better business than trying the same with the rest of the CIS region whose combined GDP is one-third of Russia's.
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Point? Ask them. My only guess is playing on the rampant Russian nationalism and make them feel superior to the others. Or simply just offering them prizes that are so good that they are hard to resist, but only for them. Or maybe something way too trivial like tax amounts. That sounds like a more logical approach.
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The cost of making the changes in pricing, maintaining them and preventing possible overuse would probably not return in sales increase taking into account that the prices go lower.
Its publisher not Valve that has the last word regarding pricing. They would rather keep their share of the market than letting steam have 90+% of sales (steam takes 30% of every purchase BTW)
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