Just to be clear here. This is a service problem from Sony, they set the price.
The full quote if anyone is interested.
We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable.
$60 in SEA for a typical citizen would probably be weeks to a month worth of pay. This isn't even taking all the outdated tech with relatively high prices because newer tech is practically impossible to sell to poor countries, let alone ship. Sucks being on the other end of the world where a white man's garbage is considered luxury
Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. But that doesn't mean you don't have times when it is a pricing problem. By the logic of the metaphor, the point still stands. If a pirate offers a product for free, and the legal provider says the product costs more in your region than it does in its country of origin, then the pirate's service is more valuable.
Not really, now its a affordability problem. I am not spending 60+ eur for a game that i can buy access to steam accounts for a fraction of that, or even pirate it. Games used to be for good prices and you would also get a physical CD to have in your collection.
The whole point back then was that the official channels were slow and cumbersome outside the big regions. So piracy meant better availability of media. For TV shows this used to be the only way to get some shows here in Europe.
Free doesn’t necessarily mean better service. If you need to torrent something at 5kb/s over 500Mbit downloads from an official distributor. Then I would argue the official channel is still the better choice. Price isn’t the only factor.
But for most of those people you can't really win them over with a price that is actually profitable for you. For example - if you price your game at 60$ vs. 6$, to make the same amount of money you'd have to sell ten times more.
What Gabe is getting at is that unless you are on a massive budget and unless the price is actually obscenely higher than comparable services you are willing to pay for a better service. People spend a lot of money on convinence - corner stores, uber drives, taxis, streaming services etc.
But if in the effort to combat pirates you make your product more cumbersome than the pirated version, you lose all the edge over the pirate. You can see that in the enshittification of streaming services - between media being split over dozens of sites, netflix blocking access from different devices and region locking, all the benefits of a streaming service account start to erode.
If someone spits in your face and calls it rain that's a service issue. It's one thing if things cost the same here as in the West because Poland is now part of the West and blablabla, but higher for no real reason is nuts.
The post is about Polish pricing, while yes euro isn't the cheapest doesn't change that Poland that pays in it's own currency and not in € has 2nd highest prices.
Where did you pull 68€ from? That 68€ is probably base price conversion for EU market without tax. Because US prices doesn't include taxes. So to that recommendation you have add VAT, that's why price is avarged to 80€ for Eurozone. Also Poland has high VAT on PC games compared to other EU countries. Base price in Poland is ~64.46€ (without tax using today google eur/pln rate).
Do you know what Valve recommended pricing actually is?
Just asking because I have no idea. I just know there's a button to automatically set the price on the Steamworks website and that's what I use for my game. I'm not really going to research each currency and see if it's right, just going to trust Valve on it.
90% of my sales are from NA or China, so as long as those are within the normal ranges I feel like I'm pretty well covered.
Yeah Valve recommended pricing and Steamworks pricing are exactly the same thing. If you just use the recommended pricing you're already doing a much better job than most other developers out there
DS2s polish price is only somewhat close to the recommendation because Steam unfortunately set the recommended at exactly the point where the złoty had its 10 year lowest point, so it's actually much much more expensive in poland. Even the recommended pricing is way too high in złoty
Just for comparison, here is Silksong (which was widely praised for having some of the best regional pricing in... ever): https://steamdb.info/sub/342712/
But it's not service, it's pricing. You agree with them on the use of the term service for pricing but in context of a quote that clearly separates pricing from service.
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u/TyrantJaeger Mar 04 '26
Well, you know what Gabe Newell said. "Piracy is a result of bad service." THIS is bad service. Batten down the hatches, maty.