129 réponses à ce sujet

[Sylvius the Mad]

Isn't this a privileged perspective, though?  You're effectively saying that people in poorer countries shouldn't have access to the game.  The only way to mandate what you are asking for is to actively deny other people from getting the goods that you want.

 

Depending on your economical perspectives, the cost of something is precisely what the user is willing to pay for it.  I'm not a fan of either the intrinsic theory of value or the cost of production theory of value.  If Sylvius wants to pay $100 for a game that I think is worth $40, then it's clear we subjectively value the game differently.  Software already has implemented price discrimination in various ways, even when it's a physical good.  It happens with big things like automobiles too.  They can sell me something at higher value, even if it's made next door, simply because I am capable (and willing) to pay for it at that price.

I agree with this, but I do understand the perspective that selling digital goods at different prices creates some DRM difficulties.  For example, as a Canadian, I know how useful it is to have a US IP address at least some of the time.

[Allan Schumacher]

I agree with this, but I do understand the perspective that selling digital goods at different prices creates some DRM difficulties.  For example, as a Canadian, I know how useful it is to have a US IP address at least some of the time.

 

The irony about DRM is that it's a situation where a subset of people self-sabotage the entire group based on their own selfishness (if people didn't buy to import/resell out of region DVDs, there'd be no need to have region encoding on DVDs and the expense of creating and adding it onto DVDs could be dropped).  I think it's an example of the Tragedy of the Commons economic theory.

 

It's not just an issue with digital goods either.  You may not have read it quite yet, but the link I posted shows that people taking advantage of price discrimination for textbooks can undermine a region's accessibility to those textbooks.  So now that region (and maybe others) will get inferior goods (whether it be inferior textbooks, or unwanted additions via DRM implementations that have been added to them) because a subset of people tried to take advantage of the situation.

[Sylvius the Mad]

 

It's not just an issue with digital goods either.  You may not have read it quite yet, but the link I posted shows that people taking advantage of price discrimination for textbooks can undermine a region's accessibility to those textbooks.  So now that region (and maybe others) will get inferior goods (whether it be inferior textbooks, or unwanted additions via DRM implementations that have been added to them) because a subset of people tried to take advantage of the situation.

Something similar occurs with the internet pharmacy business that moves prescription drugs across the US-Canada border.

[Fast Jimmy]

The irony about DRM is that it's a situation where a subset of people self-sabotage the entire group based on their own selfishness (if people didn't buy to import/resell out of region DVDs, there'd be no need to have region encoding on DVDs and the expense of creating and adding it onto DVDs could be dropped). I think it's an example of the Tragedy of the Commons economic theory.

It's not just an issue with digital goods either. You may not have read it quite yet, but the link I posted shows that people taking advantage of price discrimination for textbooks can undermine a region's accessibility to those textbooks. So now that region (and maybe others) will get inferior goods (whether it be inferior textbooks, or unwanted additions via DRM implementations that have been added to them) because a subset of people tried to take advantage of the situation.

And for digital goods, this can become a sticky mire of regulation and oversight, where you now need to somehow watch to make sure that the customers you sell the discounted goods to are correctly income-deficient to deserve it... furthering adding cost to this transaction and cutting into profits. So your attempt at widening your market by selling cheaper is either rife with corruption or burdened with costly administration.

When, in reality, if piracy of digital goods was accepted in regions where a customer base wasn't cost effective in the first place, then it would be a non-issue. Or, if not that, then overt charity or government subsidies... but those require oversight and work, as well and are, frankly, not activities most people are willing to be charitable about. Let's face it... if your charity is going to impoverished countries and giving video games to those who have the luxuries of steady power, Internet connection and sufficient recreation time, there are many who would say your charity resources could be better applied.

Also, to touch briefly on the China/WoW topic again... The average citizen in urban China (which would have Internet) is not nearly as impoverished as rough financial numbers would indicate. Due to economic policies (mainly blatant currency manipulation) China's wages are lower than they should be, but due to the articial nature of the manipulation, this affects purchases made within the country much less than it does purchases made OUTSIDE the country. An average citizen of Shanghai probably would pay through the nose for a $60 video game, given the currency exchange. However, they would have little trouble according an apartment, clothes, a mobile phone, Internet, a nice computer and even a car, as long as they were all sold and (for the most part) made in China. Some of the largest MMO playing populations in the world are in China and South Korea. So unless Blizzard specifically singled out low income, rural workers for the reduced rate, I'd wager they were angling to get a foothold against some of the large Asian MMOs in the market rather than try and spread the wonderful light that is the WoW experience. If a similar initiative was launched in sub-Saharan Africa, or practically any part of Central America except Brazil, I'd change my tune. But China has more online players than Canada. To say they would need charity MMO games sounds more like a marketing attempt by Blizzard than the actual reality.

[Allan Schumacher]

Due to economic policies (mainly blatant currency manipulation) China's wages are lower than they should be, but due to the articial nature of the manipulation, this affects purchases made within the country much less than it does purchases made OUTSIDE the country.

 

A lot of countries deal with currency manipulation.  It's in Canada's best interests to not increase the value of its dollar relative to the US dollar because doing so would make exports unlikely.  You're describing international economic policy.

 

 

 

An average citizen of Shanghai probably would pay through the nose for a $60 video game, given the currency exchange. However, they would have little trouble according an apartment, clothes, a mobile phone, Internet, a nice computer and even a car, as long as they were all sold and (for the most part) made in China.

 

This is not uncommon throughout the world.  In general I, personally, am not too affected by the Canadian dollar fluctuating.  But I agree, paying for an imported $60 video game would be prohibitively expensive.  Price discrimination would allow more people in the market to purchase games, leveraging price elasticity to increase your revenues and profits.  If Steam were available in China, it'd be pointless to sell the games at roughly $60.

 

 

 

 

Some of the largest MMO playing populations in the world are in China and South Korea. So unless Blizzard specifically singled out low income, rural workers for the reduced rate, I'd wager they were angling to get a foothold against some of the large Asian MMOs in the market rather than try and spread the wonderful light that is the WoW experience. If a similar initiative was launched in sub-Saharan Africa, or practically any part of Central America except Brazil, I'd change my tune. But China has more online players than Canada. To say they would need charity MMO games sounds more like a marketing attempt by Blizzard than the actual reality.

 

For sure.  I'm not saying that they need charity, and this is NOT a marketing attempt by Blizzard.  Blizzard doesn't advertise this.  It's just the reality of the situation: World of Warcraft is cheaper to play in China.  The reason for this is likely because the company that licenses the game concludes "We'll make more money putting it at this price point."  At no point have I ever considered price discrimination to be charity.  It's all about pricing your goods at a price that the market is willing to pay for it.

 

 

I have no issue if someone in Malaysia can get their video game (or any other good) at a lower price than what I would pay, because our economic realities are different.  It's not charity, it'd just be a game developer finding a way to make more money.

 

Which is why I don't agree with the mandate that a digital good like a video game must be sold globally at the same price.  I understand that tragedy of the commons will likely make it necessary, but I think that's just selfish.  In this sense, markets are actively denied the product when they wouldn't need to be.  I consider this bad for the consumers and developers.  Developers because it mandates that projects must be riskier than they need to be, since avenues of revenue are removed.  Consumers because developers will be more risk averse than they would need to be, assuming they're not outright denied the game in the first place.

 

 

But price discrimination is not charity, it's simply about incentivising purchases by leveraging price elasticity for a particular group.  It's what brings about things like student and seniors discounts.  But I'm under no illusions that companies do it for any other reason than to make more money.

[Ieldra]

The irony about DRM is that it's a situation where a subset of people self-sabotage the entire group based on their own selfishness (if people didn't buy to import/resell out of region DVDs, there'd be no need to have region encoding on DVDs and the expense of creating and adding it onto DVDs could be dropped).  I think it's an example of the Tragedy of the Commons economic theory.

 

It's not just an issue with digital goods either.  You may not have read it quite yet, but the link I posted shows that people taking advantage of price discrimination for textbooks can undermine a region's accessibility to those textbooks.  So now that region (and maybe others) will get inferior goods (whether it be inferior textbooks, or unwanted additions via DRM implementations that have been added to them) because a subset of people tried to take advantage of the situation.

Tragedy of the commons? I think it's more of a fairness issue. If someone from a different country just as prosperous as yours has to pay significantly less for the same good, this can legitimately be perceived as unfair. The mark-up is perceived as wilful exploitation, and, as I see it, region encoding is a means to ensure that this wilful exploitation can continue. So I don't have the least bit of a qualm about circumventing this.

 

If it's all about giving people from less prosperous countries a chance to play the games, then I agree this should not be exploited through "gray imports", but that's not the case between, say, Canada and the US.

[Allan Schumacher]

Tragedy of the commons? I think it's more of a fairness issue. If someone from a different country just as prosperous as yours has to pay significantly less for the same good, this can legitimately be perceived as unfair. The mark-up is perceived as wilful exploitation, and, as I see it, region encoding is a means to ensure that this wilful exploitation can continue. So I don't have the least bit of a qualm about circumventing this.

 

I'm not referring to Australia (which I already conceded is a situation that defies understanding).  And I'm certainly not referring to places of equivalent prosperity.  At the same time, I'm also of the opinion that if it's unfair, I don't buy it.  And yes, this means that I don't acquire things that I otherwise probably would.  But that may be my privilege speaking since I the things I really want I don't consider unfair.  I'm more talking about places in Asia, however, where DVDs are sold at retail at much cheaper than they are in the United States.  Because people do stuff like that, DRM gets created, which is why I mentioned Tragedy of the Commons, because it's the act of some selfish people looking to acquire stuff for their own benefit, which creates a situation that ends up being bad for all.

 

If you look at the link that I provided earlier, there were textbooks that are sold in the Philippines at a cheaper rate.  Someone noticed this, and started buying them to ship over to the US so resell for profit.  In effect, the textbook creator was now competing with itself.  As a result, now people in the Philippines now get either much more expensive textbooks, or lesser quality textbooks, as measures to ensure that people don't do this.  I'm not keen on citing fairness as a reason that these actions can be done, because I don't see it as particularly fair to people in the Philippines that now face increased financial hardship in pursuing an education in a situation where their financial situation is not like the one in North America.

[Ryzaki]

Ugh. I feel absolutely ZERO sympathy for the BS college textbook industry. Changing smidges of their texts to have you pay out the nose for basically the same information 2 years later (There's a perfectly fine book made 2 years ago with information still relevant but nooooo you need the new edition for the class) and...

 

*throws hands*

 

*grumbles*

 

>_>

 

 

NVM me.

[Ieldra]

@Allan:

All right, I concede the point in your textbook example and comparable cases. As for "don't buy it if you think the price is unfair", it's not as easy as that. In fact, video games are more expensive in my country than in the US, basically the same price in Euros a US customer pays in dollars. I can easily afford the games at that price and I do think they're adequately priced in an absolute sense, but the mere fact that US customers - from another prosperous "first-world" country - get their games cheaper just because the general perception of a fair price is different there comes across as unfair to me, and preventing me from exploiting such a price difference - which international corporations do on a much bigger scale every day - comes across as legalized profiteering.

[Allan Schumacher]

@Allan:

All right, I concede the point in your textbook example and comparable cases. As for "don't buy it if you think the price is unfair", it's not as easy as that. In fact, video games are more expensive in my country than in the US, basically the same price in Euros a US customer pays in dollars. I can easily afford the games at that price and I do think they're adequately priced in an absolute sense, but the mere fact that US customers - from another prosperous "first-world" country - get their games cheaper just because the general perception of a fair price is different there comes across as unfair to me, and preventing me from exploiting such a price difference - which international corporations do on a much bigger scale every day - comes across as legalized profiteering.

 

I'll agree it's not fair, but the Capitalist in me would need to examine how sales work in Europe and Australia.  Do the games still actually typically sell well, in high volume, at those particular higher prices?

[Divine Justinia V]

I'm.. a little confused.

[KaiserShep]

Ugh. I feel absolutely ZERO sympathy for the BS college textbook industry. Changing smidges of their texts to have you pay out the nose for basically the same information 2 years later (There's a perfectly fine book made 2 years ago with information still relevant but nooooo you need the new edition for the class) and...

 

*throws hands*

 

*grumbles*

 

>_>

 

 

NVM me.

 

Yeah, College textbook publishing is quite the racket.

[AlanC9]

Ugh. I feel absolutely ZERO sympathy for the BS college textbook industry. Changing smidges of their texts to have you pay out the nose for basically the same information 2 years later (There's a perfectly fine book made 2 years ago with information still relevant but nooooo you need the new edition for the class) and...

 

*throws hands*

 

*grumbles*

 

>_>

 

 

NVM me.

 

 

Hey, I've worked in that industry. You're.... pretty much right. (Though since my area was law school texts, foreign sales didn't come up often enough for us to care.)

[AlanC9]

I'll agree it's not fair, but the Capitalist in me would need to examine how sales work in Europe and Australia.  Do the games still actually typically sell well, in high volume, at those particular higher prices?

 

Oh, great... now someone's going to figure out that they can get away with doubling game prices in the US. 

[Ieldra]

I'll agree it's not fair, but the Capitalist in me would need to examine how sales work in Europe and Australia.  Do the games still actually typically sell well, in high volume, at those particular higher prices?

I don't have sales figures, but my impression is that sales wouldn't drastically increase by lowering the price to the US equivalent. Also, the advent of digital distribution and less games censorship means that gray imports are increasingly not worth the effort. That's just how things go, though, and I don't have a problem with it. However, I find it not acceptable when corporations use technical means in order to prevent me from - legitimately, as I see it - exploiting price differences in cases where I think it's worth the effort. The day I'll accept this will be the day when corporations and banks agree to finance market regulations that prevent *them* from doing the same.

[Allan Schumacher]

Oh, great... now someone's going to figure out that they can get away with doubling game prices in the US. 

 

Well, define "get away with."  It's probably not popular, but if games were sold at $100 in the US and the sales numbers for all games didn't change in any capacity, then I think it's safe to say that the box price of games was low.  Though I would expect a price jump like that to have pretty significant effects as gaming is ultimately a luxury good so it will have greater price elasticity.

 

Though I find that economies of scale have come into play here.  For my NES, games tended to be $60 or $70, but now most games are $50 to $60.  So in the span of almost 30 years, the cost of a game (adjusted for inflation) has decreased.  But the number of gamers has also gone up a lot, so a lot of them didn't grow up with $70 games.

 

 

 

I don't have sales figures, but my impression is that sales wouldn't drastically increase by lowering the price to the US equivalent. Also, the advent of digital distribution and less games censorship means that gray imports are increasingly not worth the effort. That's just how things go, though, and I don't have a problem with it. However, I find it not acceptable when corporations use technical means in order to prevent me from - legitimately, as I see it - exploiting price differences in cases where I think it's worth the effort. The day I'll accept this will be the day when corporations and banks agree to finance market regulations that prevent *them* from doing the same.

 

That's unfortunate about the elasticity.  It is true that consumers as a whole do not act as a single voice, and as such they are divided in their efforts.  I've often wondered how Australia would do if all gamers decided to not buy games until the prices dropped to $60.  I'm also curious if the cost is kept there simply because "well if they buy it at that price, more money for us.  If they circumvent and get it at $60, that's acceptable."

 

I suppose, upon reflection, it's fair to say I'm talking about an ideal.  This is what I sort of mean by tragedy of the commons, because places like South America and Asia actually consume a lot of games (Russia too I think), but the piracy market is so prevalent there that the only way to sell legitimate copies is to price them much lower.  Part of the reason for piracy is that the games are so expensive.

 

So while I think it'd be great if price point parity could be exercised between regions of different prosperity, you're always going to get people that circumvent it or say it's unfair, which will cause the content creators (often big corporations with greater lobby power) to want to curtail it.  The only other alternative is to not sell it in those regions, which is where the tragedy part comes in.  Because while I find the ability to charge different prices to be a strength of digital distribution, the digital nature of it means that you or I will find it much more likely that we'll "think it's worth the effort" to take advantage of purchasing from other regions because it's cheaper.

But yes, big corporations and banks are pretty exploitative themselves.

[Ieldra]

And to get back to the topic:

 

As a rule, I don't have anything against day 1 DLC. It comes across as a slightly questionable practice, but I'd rather have the content than not have it. The big question is: can I believe the publishers and developers when they say it isn't just a case of making the main game smaller for extra profit? I have no way to assess this but gave them the benefit of the doubt in the past. That lasted until ME3 and its leaked game script, which showed that pretty much all of Javik's lines already existed and were 100% integrated into the game script. All except the actual mission where you acquire him. That means all but one dialogue scene, the huge majority of his content. In addition to that - and note that for me this is the more significant factor since it's evidence that developers are perfectly ok with damaging their story in order to make more profit - he was a character with critical perspective on the game's main theme (organic vs. synthetic), which even with him present barely got enough screen presence to establish it convincingly as the main theme.

 

So, now I don't give developers the benefit of the doubt anymore. I still usually get the day 1 DLC since I tend to buy CEs which include them, but I'm much more critical of the practice, and since the "bang for the buck" ratio is much worse for DLC than for full games as a rule, I now consider more carefully before I buy any early DLC. For franchises I'm a fan of I'll still get all the available content eventually, but I'm much more likely to wait for package deals. As an added effect, for games where I'm not a hardcore fan of the franchise, I'm more likely to delay the purchasing of games for a year or more since I have reason to believe what I get at release isn't the full content.

 

I do value game expansions though. The bigger the package, the more likely I'll appreciate it. I'd still buy something like DAO:Awakening or XCOM:Enemy WIthin at full price without much consideration if I like the main game.

[Deebo305]

I see no real problem with Day One DLC, its basicially more incentive to buy it new rather than used. The problem with Javik from ME3 was that he only came for the Collecters Edition which was BS quite honestly where as Zaeed from ME2 came free with every new copy of ME2. Day One dlc is alway fine so long as its done right

[AlanC9]

Well, define "get away with."  It's probably not popular, but if games were sold at $100 in the US and the sales numbers for all games didn't change in any capacity, then I think it's safe to say that the box price of games was low.  Though I would expect a price jump like that to have pretty significant effects as gaming is ultimately a luxury good so it will have greater price elasticity.

 

Though I find that economies of scale have come into play here.  For my NES, games tended to be $60 or $70, but now most games are $50 to $60.  So in the span of almost 30 years, the cost of a game (adjusted for inflation) has decreased.  But the number of gamers has also gone up a lot, so a lot of them didn't grow up with $70 games.

 

 

I was just being paranoid there. From what I've seen PC games have tended to hover around a price that's somewhere around $65 in 2014 dollars; sometimes less, sometimes more, but not very far from it. (It's a little hard to compare eras because there was more variation in sale prices for new titles back in the 80s and 90s.) I don't think the market would overprice games for that many years, so I suspect the current prices are "right."

 

As opposed to, say, hardware, where prices really have dropped over the decades. I just dropped by Micro Center today and noticed a nice little Alienware gaming laptop. It should be nice for $2400. My first computer, a Mac SE, also cost about $2400. But after adjusting for inflation, that's over $5100 today, and the SE wasn't even a high-end Mac for its era.

[kwinkatopo]

Honestly, only a fan of Day One DLC if it's with a pre-purchase or for trying (not buying) out another game by the same company. Outside of that, I'd rather not pay for something that should be included already.

[Vegeta 77]

There still will be day one dlc missions or armour 

[Monoten]

There still will be day one dlc missions or armour 

Where does it say that?

[Bob from Accounting]

What exactly is the basis for people thinking they automatically deserve any content the developer is finished with before release for the release price?

 

I'm curious.

[Vegeta 77]

Where does it say that?

Just a guess