Different prices for different countries?

    Pretty sure its mainly based off of regional spending trends on digital items. If they assume the NA region will spend more, they'll charge more. Obviously if that assumption is wrong, they will adjust prices accordingly.

    Quote from SachiFaker

    Pretty sure its mainly based off of regional spending trends on digital items. If they assume the NA region will spend more, they'll charge more. Obviously if that assumption is wrong, they will adjust prices accordingly.

    No I highly doubt it. Mainly because a friend of mine who resides in Greece (we all know the economy over there) has the same prices as me while people from Portugal and Estonia have better deals.

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    Canadian pricing is downright retarded. I'm not paying $30 for a single hairstyle. I'm used to being screwed over a bit, but you'd have to be pretty stupid to pay for some of these items. I usually buy a few outfits in mmo's but these prices are ridiculous for what you get. $10 CAD is what a basic outfit is worth. That's what I pay in BnS, Tera, etc. A hairstyle is worth 5 bucks at absolute max.


    I don't see how they expect to make sales to the average player like this. They need to fix their NA pricing in general. It makes no sense.

    Quote from Aimi
    Quote from SachiFaker

    Pretty sure its mainly based off of regional spending trends on digital items. If they assume the NA region will spend more, they'll charge more. Obviously if that assumption is wrong, they will adjust prices accordingly.

    No I highly doubt it. Mainly because a friend of mine who resides in Greece (we all know the economy over there) has the same prices as me while people from Portugal and Estonia have better deals.

    Portugal Econ is absoutle garbage.

    XD

    Quote from Eve
    Quote from Aimi
    Quote from SachiFaker

    Pretty sure its mainly based off of regional spending trends on digital items. If they assume the NA region will spend more, they'll charge more. Obviously if that assumption is wrong, they will adjust prices accordingly.

    No I highly doubt it. Mainly because a friend of mine who resides in Greece (we all know the economy over there) has the same prices as me while people from Portugal and Estonia have better deals.

    Portugal Econ is absoutle garbage.

    Wether it is or not is not the point I was trying to make.

    I was trying to say that Greece should be in the same category as Portugal and Estonia but it is not.

    What is even weirder is that Norway (which is economic wise doing GREAT) has the best deals

    with 26,000 for 100 euro's

    76561198086826417.png

    Quote from Aimi
    Quote from SachiFaker

    Pretty sure its mainly based off of regional spending trends on digital items. If they assume the NA region will spend more, they'll charge more. Obviously if that assumption is wrong, they will adjust prices accordingly.

    No I highly doubt it. Mainly because a friend of mine who resides in Greece (we all know the economy over there) has the same prices as me while people from Portugal and Estonia have better deals.

    I don't mean region as in country, but the encompassing server region as a whole. Could be different instances of the cash shop based on country IP-- if your friends from those countries all play on the server, but have different rates-- but that seems like a waste to me.


    This is my first Gameforge game, but my guess is that they pull data sets from similar regions in other games they publish to help them determine the baseline prices they used.

    Could we get more information on this? I can understand there's going to be at least a bit of difference between countries with exchange rates, but the experience of actually purchasing something is much more negative when you need to hit a $50 minimum purchase to get a majority of cosmetics in the store for something that costs less than 25€ in other Gameforge localized regions.


    Even if there's further complications with the payment partners involved in the game, it's better for everyone if people feel like they're able to enjoy spending money on the game rather than feeling like the game is asking for twice as much as something is worth minimum. It makes people resentful rather than happy to buy something.


    I'm...not entirely sure what you mean by the other parts, though. Obviously it's going to differ by game, since the concern here is with SoulWorker in specific. And...well yes, the price point differs by price point. What do we mean by individual basis?


    At the very least, could we get some sort of confirmation that the Monetization Designer or whichever role is looking over the user experience of buying stuff in different regions? As it stands right now even if the actual Soulcash needed for items doesn't change, NA users not only have the lowest amount of soulcash per money spent, but also have the largest jump from $20 to $50 to get anything more than smaller purchases. It's detrimental to both our experience and GF's profits.


    If there's specific data that's being used to set this price point, could we invite them to talk about that data on the forums and how they came to that decision to discuss it? At minimum, having more information can at least help us understand how the choice was made, and be able to discuss what better options would be available with someone who knows how the system is supposed to work. Nobody wants buying stuff to be a bad thing.

    As someone who has worked in business/marketing analytics for a couple years, I can tell you that no company will release or discuss(in-depth) that information with their consumers.


    But on a positive note, the publisher does care about the bottom-line, so if they feel they'll make more of a profit by reducing prices then that's what we'll see. I would personally love to support the pubs/devs (I usually do with f2p games), but it's hard to for me to personally justify spending that kind of money for barely any content.

    That's fair. I guess part of it comes from the fact that a confirmation would at least ease tensions - something to show us that they're looking at the situation and how it can be improved, but at the same time that can also be turned into hollow marketing talk, so there's that lingering feeling that it wouldn't be enough unless we're shown the fixes down the line.


    I do think there needs to be some sort of a compromise or re-balancing in regards to monetization. NA in particular's pricing model feels more like a blunder, something like the data saying 'people IN NA are more likely to spend $20 at a medium soulcash price' but forgetting that most of the substantial stuff in the market costs more than that and the next biggest step is competing with most AAA games in price. $20 is too low where $50 is too high, and as a result nobody's able to really pay what the items are worth. If it's not a blunder and this has actually been considered thoroughly enough, then there should be a way to compromise for giving the player a more enjoyable experience buying while still maintaining some of the benefits of the current system.

    So does everyone pay the same amount of Soulcash per item? If so then maybe there is an option for making shops more balanced between regions by making each shop's soul cash price differ based on where you are...I mean they did that with price for buying the soul cash. Like say an item that is sold for 400 soul cash in another region that gets like 2x more soul cash than we do, then just make the item around 200 soul cash for NA. Because as it stands now, you aren't going to get many people from NA to actually buy anything from the store (maybe not even whales at that price...) and in the end you'll miss out on so much profit considering NA is a large part of your player base.


    This also counts me as well. Normally I'm all for spending money on games and I generally spend a lot over time...I'm no "whale" but I usually spend maybe like $40-60 a week or so if I like the game enough and feel the game and shop is fair. At this price, I don't even want to spend $5 on it...


    Also...$20 for a hairstyle is insane, especially since we basically have no options hairstyles so we really should of had all those hair styles and colors in the game already to begin with. One of the turn offs for these types of games to some people has always been the lack of customization at character creation, and seeing it basically feeling like it was ripped out of there to be sold for $20+ is going to turn away a lot of potential players and to make things worse...you can't even view how it looks like before you buy it even if you wanted to buy it.

    If you sell goods in different countries, the price will depend on local taxes and import duty. However Virtual goods have neither taxes or import duties applied to them. So shouldn't countries with the same currency ( like Euro ) have the exact same price?


    Quote from SachiFaker
    Quote from Aimi
    Quote from SachiFaker

    Pretty sure its mainly based off of regional spending trends on digital items. If they assume the NA region will spend more, they'll charge more. Obviously if that assumption is wrong, they will adjust prices accordingly.

    No I highly doubt it. Mainly because a friend of mine who resides in Greece (we all know the economy over there) has the same prices as me while people from Portugal and Estonia have better deals.

    I don't mean region as in country, but the encompassing server region as a whole. Could be different instances of the cash shop based on country IP-- if your friends from those countries all play on the server, but have different rates-- but that seems like a waste to me.


    This is my first Gameforge game, but my guess is that they pull data sets from similar regions in other games they publish to help them determine the baseline prices they used.

    Makes you wonder if people will use VPN to get the best deals.

    W-erwin.png

    Edited once, last by Erwin ().

    Quote from Nan

    I think it should be interesting to see how GameForge plans to deal with people buying from other regions, if at all.

    Exactly, if you are from Germany and use VPN from Portugal, you will get 20% more SoulCash for the same money. And 20% that's a really big amount.

    W-erwin.png

    That doesn't make any sense because evrything is included with VAT.

    and it's before you choose a payment option.

    Quote from Erwin
    Quote from Nan

    I think it should be interesting to see how GameForge plans to deal with people buying from other regions, if at all.

    Exactly, if you are from Germany and use VPN from Portugal, you will get 20% more SoulCash for the same money. And 20% that's a really big amount.

    True.
    But you risk to get your account banned.