Regional Pricing In Gaming Makes No Sense
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- Опубликовано: 27 июн 2024
- As the world opens up to global competitions for the FGC, we need to examine what's preventing our subset of the gaming world from growing into an even bigger community. Around the world, many players can't play the games they want because of nonsensical pricing practices that make games more expensive for them than they are in the States even when purchased from digital stores like Steam or Epic Games! Bigger releases like Street Fighter 6 and Tekken 8 have brought this problem to light even more as of late.
Below I'll be listing all the sources of where I got my info from and the people who helped me understand this problem from multiple perspectives.
Interviews:
@MCMuraFGC
@AngelFreak_
/ kanebluerivercl
Sources:
docs.google.com/document/d/1B...
Timestamps:
00:00 - Intro
03:50 - Regional Pricing
07:31 - Piracy and You
12:06 - How Do We Fix This?
16:51 - Outro 
Игры
As a dev, I can tell you this: the fucked up thing is that those publishers are setting unreasonable regional prices intentionally. Steam already suggests regional pricing for titles. Devs have to manually go through and override suggested Steam's regional pricing to make their games unaffordable in places like Latin America.
Yes. SF6, Tekken 8, Strive and KOF XV all came costing 1/4 of brazilian minimum monthly wage for EACH GAME
Geez. And you guys put KOF on the fucking map. Brazil, I mean.
Strive had localizati9n so it costed on launch like $20.000 clp here. Right now the DLC cost $18.000 and none bought it.
@@Spit1990 Brazil and Mexico mainly, and then other south American countries with a strong arcade culture.
But then that has to do with the arcades. That strong culture was only formed because of arcades being a kind of public format and the sessions being cheap. So when console gaming became the dominant model, that SNK/KOF culture started to weaken (though in the same level of SF and I'm not exaggerating).
Then some actual disappointments with the new 3d KOFs made the situation worse... but even if the games were greatly received by the Brazilian fans, that old KOF culture would struggle to keep the same force, because of the unfavorable prices. Whoever can afford modern gaming costs will prefer to stick to fgs with larger playerbase or good single player content... And KOF can't do much on either side. So the KOF community is mostly retro driven, kinda like the MvC community currently.
@@astjuly8239Strive had reginal price in Brazil, they doubled it's price after some time.
At least it is now on gamepass.
I'm from Colombia and I had never played fighting games because of their high prices. A new game like Tekken or SF costs 230000 COP or more, which is almost 1/3 of the minimum monthly income of the country. I started playing fighting games because of Guilty Gear Strive, its regional price in the country was supremely accessible 60000 COP since that moment I reconnected with fighting games and even bought character passes because it was very accessible. But last year the regional price was removed and the value of the game is now 154000 COP. I didn't buy character passes for the game again, it's too much money from my country. I know it is a difficult problem to solve, but it is evident how they lose potential consumers because of the price management.
Same situation here in Brazil, got the base game but the current season pass is more expensive than what I paid for the base game, wtf
Ustedes hablan como si en Colombia y Brazil no chipean las consolas para jugar copias.
Claro Bro, porque si quiero jugar Tekken 8 en online (que es prácticamente el único modo de jugar multijugador contra otras personas que no sean tus amigos) tengo que piratear una ps5, que idea brillante.@@Retrofun69
People can't even complain about prices anymore bc if you do, there's always a North American to say, "Just get a job to afford it"
The prices of games in general are ridiculous and some games don't even have enough content to justify it. Not only that, but the game is incomplete since there's season passes already announced. Yes, looking at you every fighting game launched for the last 10+ years
Yeah, and that's why it's not talked about by Americans. It's not their problem, so it's not worth their time or their audience's time. Or people from other developed countries anyways.
In the video about the studio making 25% income from brazil, they also mention steam has an excellent way of preventing vpns from actually being able to take advantage of their systems
Yeah over here in Latam playing something on release is basically impossible even with regional pricing. We have to wait for a 50% off or more.
And there's the additional problematic layer of those conditions harm the lower class games much more in the underdeveloped countries. Not even the notable historical attachment to SNK and KOF is able to push south american fg communities to the latest games. So everything below the popularity tier of SF, TK and MK is extra threatened.
@@carlosaugusto9821yeah, if it's not a big name with lots of clout people don't give it a chance and can't blame them.
When it comes to fighting games, I saved for months to get SF6 on release and even when it has been the best release in decades it still shocks me when the game pairs me against someone from my country and the game has been out almost a year.
So true. Tekken 8 would cost 50% of the minimum wage of my country. Is just way to much.
here in brazil the prices are absurd
i'am at the moment saving money to buy tekken in 5~6 months because the price of the game is literally a month worth of groceries and i have a wife and daughter to take care of
I'm so glad that someone else saw the exact same problem I saw about regional pricing. Back when DNF Duel released we all know it didn't sell that well, despite being the spinoff of the actual world's most played MMO, particularly because of China.
So I went and checked CN social media to see what people's impressions of the game are; Straight up I didn't have to go deep, the first few complains I saw was people asking why the price is so high. Lack of regional pricing straight up blocked their biggest target audiences from buying the game, this is what killed the game.
I remember Diablo 2 had regional pricing, you could get the CD key for like 2 dollars a piece in Venezuela. People were buying the tons of them and reselling them for like $6. They took that regional pricing out quick. these companies want that money, they're not gonna let anybody catch a deal with a VPN or proxy
Yeah that's the other crappy side of this whole thing. One way or another, someone gets screwed :/
Taking into account how desperate things are in Venezuela for some...
Damnit man...
This is no longer an issue as Steam actively bans people who use VPNs to buy games cheaper nowadays
Im pretty sure developers can make the keys region locked so you cannot sell keys outside of your region avoiding this problem altogether
We in the FGC don't always speak the same language but we have a special connection through our ability to share our experiences within our fighting games. Some of the most heartwarming experiences I have had was playing KOF 14 and connecting to a Brazilian lobby where we all only knew a few words to communicate to each other. We fought each other and laughed because we shared a medium together that allowed us to communicate. The matches didn't end in salt but ended with encouragement and enthusiasm from seven rowdy Brazilians and an American southerner. We have to be able to connect to one another and share our experiences. Pricing people out of these communal spaces is frankly inhumane and is an attempt to kill the human spirit. You can call this dramatic but making human connections via the beautiful medium of fighting games is something everyone should have access to.
people are being priced out of literally all spaces including housing. dystopian
@@terry.1428 You are absolutely correct. This is why housing, food, water, education, and healthcare should be free and fully recognized as human rights so that everyone can live in dignity.
I just recently got into Fighting Games thanks to Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising. When the game came out, one of my friends found a way to play the demo version while having the game think you had the full game, our friend group had lots of fun with the game until the exploit got patched, although most of us would have liked to keep playing, the game's price was simply prohibitive to anyone in the group who was not american.
The game here in Brazil costs R$265, which is just over 40 hours worth of work (or almost a full week), that price is roughly what one expects to spend doing groceries for 2 weeks, between having to choose to buy food for 2 weeks or a singular video-game, the choice is quite obvious, the only reason I was able to keep playing GBVSR is because one of my american friends gifted the game to me.
I'm glad to see someone finally talking about the issue of regional pricing in the FGC, I am new here but it sucks that some of the games I want to try out with my friends are basically locked behind an absurd paywall.
Fun Fact: Granblue Fantasy Relink Special Edition costs $80 while Versus: Rising costs $50. But because Relink has regional prices and Versus doesn't, they cost almost the same in Brazil
While fighting games are still rather expensive in my country (Indonesia), the regional pricing makes it worth about 45 to 51 USD tops, with the Ultimate Editions usually ranging to actually 60 USD. In hindsight, it's kind of a steal when those are the prices without a discount. It's still quite a pinch at the wallet tho for the average Indonesian income.
A friend of mine wanted to buy Doom Eternal but for whatever arcane reason the game was priced at 20000dh on the microsoft store, which is orders of magnitude larger than the minimum salary here, and also more than 2000$ with the current exchange rate.
Thankfully Steam had much more reasonable regional pricing.
This is a reason why I think project L will be a big deal in latam countries. Speaking as a Brazilian, I think the game will be rather big here.
I've noticed this in a lot of comments on my channel. It seems to have the potential to change the fgc forever
@@qmanchu yeah, if they play their cards right it could be the biggest fighting around here. Riot has seen enormous success in Brazil in terms of eSports. League and Valorant are both huge here, and since it's a tag game maybe even some older KoFheads could get into it.
Yeah true, in Russia GBFVR and UNI 2 is 3600 roubles which is almost 20 hours of work (if we take the median salary 200-250rub/h)
You keep outdoing yourself, Qmanchu. Keep at it and well done with finding a great range of guests too.
Appreciate the Slap City OST use as well.
Thanks a lot my friend. The goal is to keep getting better while hopefully bringing things like this to light!
Slap City music is wildly good for how goofy the game is haha
I died at the always sunny cut lmfao
It's giving me mad issues with Copyright right now but it's way too good to cut out haha
Noooooo!! That's so saddening to hear man ToT Hope the issue gets resolved quick!! If not, you could always resort to swaping the sound clip with a cover of the always sunny themesong. I hear that works well for other yters@@qmanchu
Great video, im from south america and some prices are way out of reach and the best we can do is wait for a good discount, witch in fighting games means starting late and with a way smaller community, some games get so small that they are dead by the time you can get them. Worst is that most companies that create fighting games live in the past like if their games still came out in arcades all over the world....
By now the best we can do is hope Project L comes out and becomes a great success, so much so that big companies will have to adapt to the new ages, i dont believe every game should be f2p but a f2p version like with Grandblue Fantasy Versus Rising would help a lot, even if you let them buy new fighters by grinding the game a lot, if would help them get more people so that the people that buy the game have more people to play against.
THis does indeed seem like a really hot topic, and as a mexican, I dont have it as bad as other people, but the problem still persists, and hopefully there's a solution to the pricing issues.
It's an industry encompassing issue, not just fighting games. In the past few years less and less games use regional pricing, and those what still do price it closer to US price. And mostly it's because of the investors and game dev companies being publically traded, which means they don't need just profits, they need constant growth of profits. Here's a simple example, Larian Studios is a privately owned company, so they can set pricing for games they make. I can buy 2 copies of Baldur's Gate 3 and still have leftover, instead of buying Tekken 8 (which btw is regionally priced at about 43-45 USD converted). In fact I can buy 3 copies of BG3 for 60 converted USD. You tell me if Tekken 8 is better value proposition than BG3 twice.
I agree investors play a big role - they don’t care about the product or the community, they don’t want to just make sure the game makes a reasonable profit, they don’t care about growing the community in different regions who may end up buying more games later on. They only care about maximum profit as soon as possible - investors might not even own the stock any more next month so they dgaf about growing a scene in another country. Even without investors companies are run more and more like this these days
the funny thing is if u wait it out for prices to go for sale , people would have move on to what's popular and the skill gab is so much that most new players are more likely enjoy the game when everyone is new to it than having people with more than a year worth of experience
This is a really good video. People need to be addressing regional pricing issues more. It's no wonder people go through other means to play their games. I was going to just outright say the word for it but youtube actually shadowbans peoples comments now if you say certain words and you can't tell if your message is hidden automatically or not.
Without boring you too much I used to work in the industry and a digital copy of a triple A game should never be more than £30. Games that have already sold a million units should not be more than £20.
Honestly, I'd like to hear more from the industry side of this issue. I reached out to some people for comment but they didn't get back to me
I knew people were on to something when they suspected that digital games really shouldn't cost as much as 60-70€.
@@qmanchuwhen you buy a physical game for £50 the retailer has purchased it for around £35. Add VAT tax and that’s £38. The retailer can ask for £50 but also drop the price to £40 or £45 and make a little profit. The retailer bought it from the distributor for £35, the distributor purchases from the publisher and that will be around £33 each. The distributor makes a very small profit per transaction. The cost of producing the cases, printing the discs, shipping from a factory to a warehouse, etc, works out around £3 per unit. EA used to infamously never have a colour instruction manual because it saved £0.10 per unit. So the publisher is starting with a price point of £30 and the money of the manufacturing/shipping, the profit of the distributor, the income for the taxman, and the profit for the retailer, is now all directly going to the publisher.
I’m all for digital games, but would never buy a digital game for more than £30. Companies like Nintendo selling an 8 year old port of mario kart for the wii u for £50 is disgusting. I think it has made around $200m profit on that game
Funny fact: GGST DLCs Passes used to cost R$43.00 in Brazil. Season 3 costs R$107.00. The game itself is costing R$173.99 full price. The same goes with SF6 having R$259.99 full price, while 2 DLCs characters are costing around R$60.00.
Our minimum monthly wage is R$1412.00; the average value of our monthly shopping for food is almost R$400.00; while our expenses with taxes are close R$300.00 or more when we talk about water and electric energy.
Honestly, we can't afford those games if we can't actually buy ourselves food. Steam jsed to put those prices around R$160.00 and it still expensive but not that much how it is nowadays with R$260.00 for ONE game.
Just hope we can see a future where we can be free to consume culture with reasonable local pricing.
i wanted to play under night 2 so bad, i loved uni1 so when uni2 went pre release and saw the price, my dream of playing it crushed, so i stick with strive, that in the microsoft store in argentina is in a reasonable price, i even bought some dlcs too. I hope they dont do the same as the steam release of the game that went from 3k ars to 28k when johnny got in the game
That's unbelievable honestly! It sounds wild in Argentina right now and I hope you're doing alright otherwise my friend
just pirate
Thanks for shining a spotlight on the issue. It was heartbreaking to see UNI2 and Tekken 8 releasing together at the same price because ASW undid all their regional pricing, and knowing UNI didn't stand a chance (on top of all the other issues). And Tekken already wasn't that cheap for a $70 game.
I'm very skeptic of the F2P model, though, it's so hard for games to survive in that space. GBVS Rising probably went the farthest one could reasonably go.
Just wait until project l and you'll see how viable free to play can be
Also that sounds fucked for other regions
Uni is 20 usd cheaper than t7 for base, and 40 cheaper for deluxe
@@V2ULTRAKill Riot managed to fuck up their F2P card game by being too generous, and that's a game where you can pay for power (although you don't have to) and is way cheaper to develop.
Project L has to be an insane breakout hit if they want to make most of their income from cosmetics.
F2p in fgs in general is still a mystery. There are not means to make conclusions at the moment. But I believe it won't happen to the top franchises at least, especially after how well SF, MK and TK did with their latest releases.
Apparently those 3 companies figured out a new "game making meta" by putting effort in single player content and overall package volume, trying to make the product more attractive to the general public.
Meanwhile the lower class games are behind that trio, in the content package aspect. So maybe they will need strategies of that kind to stand out in the future... F2P, or even lower price, bigger base roster (less dlc), means to offer free dlcs, etc.
Thank you for making this video, I almost never see anyone talking about these issues in the english speaking community
That was something that blew me away actually. LATAM is such a HUGE market for fighting games and yet so many countries can't interact with the newest games without doing so illegally and it's easy to notice this problem. I hope this video catches somebody's eye somewhere and maybe we get a bigger spotlight on the issues at hand. Thanks for watching
Thanks for covering this topic!
Yeah of course! I'm shocked to see it isn't talked about nearly as much across the big content creators in our community. Hopefully people share this one around to get some traction and eyes on it!
Everything is Canada is far more expensive than what it costs in the US and it prices me out of lots of games. Not because I can’t afford it but because I refuse to pay those costs for new games
LESGOOOO FIRST!!! Love ur vids my man!!
Your videos fill the gap core A gaming left in me
That's big praise 🙏
I appreciate that more than you know
Hey the audio cut out at 2:51
Yeah had to do that for copyright reasons lol. Thanks for the heads up
I'm really glad I watched this!
Ah yes, regional pricing. DNF Duel's one and only issue
Argentinian here, not only are the prices outrageous, but even if I buy a game, I get matched against the same 2 people and the conection is horrendous, most people here are wifi players (me included)
In general the situation of fgs in underdeveloped countries is complicated. And it gets much worse to the "low class" games below SF, MK and TK, with the playerbase issue. Another layer of problems is brought by 3rd world average internet services. And naturally the game netcode. (Which gladly made big improvements for all games lately, but it was bad in general) And the fact that every game has dlc seasons, and big games like SF and TK can go really far with dlc seasons... And missing dlc in this fg genre means missing a lot (it's their strategy to sell after all). So the total spendings in a single game will be much more painful and heavy in the underde country than elsewhere (where it also hurts).
That way It's easy to see console gamers being very mindful about investing in this genre... when there are other games that can be entertaining enough and are not as much expensive even with their dlc included (thinking about the total costs of a modern fg from the base release to every single dlc until the end). At least whoever can afford fgs will prefer to stick to SF, or maybe two games, instead of the more "1st world" habit of buying everything that comes out.
@@carlosaugusto9821 Just seeing the dbfz roster saddens me, more than half of the roster is just locked behind a paywall, I'm not against dlc, but for god's sake just let me use them to lab in training mode
Another banger brother!
This affects us all!
People don't worry of the pricing til it gets to them, don't hesitate to show this is bad! Think of all the skill that could come from countries needing to buy a game that's 3 times as much for them than us, while we make more money than them. So much lost potential😒
Caught me off guard with the McDonald's intro. Thought for a second our big problem was burger flipping.
16:03 most interesting braelhalla neutral
Regional pricing is the main reason sites outside of Steam are able to sell games, even brand new ones at noticeably lower prices than Steam. Either there needs to be bureaucracy out the ass to let globally poorer countries get games at a reasonable price without richer countries exploiting the pricing or something needs to be done about the model as the video suggests. It is sadly complicated.
That’s already a thing on Steam. It’s essentially impossible to use a VPN to get a cheaper game on Steam without also getting banned nowadays. The onus is purely on publishers actually using the feature, which they’re not because $$
As a Peruvian, regional pricing and steam sales have given me a huge backlog of games. I used to pirate games a lot but now I don’t bother when buying them is more convenient and the price is fair for us.
Here in Mexico minimun wage is like a 1740 pesos a week, games on release cost like 1500 pesos
outro song name??
To solve the VPN problem is simple, only allow regional pricing via national paying methods, here in Brazil we have pix, national credit cards and things like that... If the regional pricing was tied to regional paying methods people from others countries wouldn't be able to abuse it.
Considering the fact that they charge for characters and charge for cosmetics, we shouldn't be supporting fighting games that have box prices AT ALL.
Honestly, a month ago I'd disagree with you big time but after breaking this issue down, I think you're right. Live service AND full price out the gate should not be the standard moving forward
This has become the dominant practice in the genre, and there's no escape. No fg truly costs only their launch price... That's just a kind of "entry". The total spendings on a fg nowadays is several times the price of the base game.
And this strategy was set up in a way you can't run from it, otherwise you will miss a lot. The "full/real roster" nowadays is 2x to 3x the size of the base roster. And dlc seasons are set in a way that some popular chars are reserved for those packs, so the purchase is irresistible. And note that base rosters tend to come out smaller than in past generations. (That changed a bit with the newest versions of some games, but my comment was more accurate about the PS4 versions)
@@qmanchu for better or worse Project L will probably change this, with it's f2p model likely to put a fair bit of pressure on the old guard.
I think a lot of fighting game companies should really lower prices in regions and are overthinking profit loss. Not having an affordable game in a region almost guarantees any person playing in the region is a pirate. They also need to realize that if someone is motivated enough to change their region for a cheaper price likely needs the discount. I doubt people who have the money would actually go through the effort of changing their region to save a few bucks.
It's a small percentage of people who would do it but it does happen a significant amount. Lots of big game releases in other genres suffered because of this. I don't think we've seen it with fighting games though. I didn't see any evidence
If you think that, you're underthinking human greed or just bought into the argument that piracy is this righteous, Robin Hood-esque movement that only people without means engage in.
The funniest part is that the devs would make MORE money if they localized their prices
For a while. The moment VPN abuse becomes widespread they start losing more money from developed country markets than they gain from localized prices.
Damn this is really well voice acted
I'm trying very hard to get better with my voice over. I tried hardest in this one actually. You can probably hear I was starting to lose my voice towards the end so I actually thought it was kinda bad lol. I really appreciate this comment though because it's one of my weak points in content
@@qmanchu no problem man I really enjoy your content, keep it up.
the way I see it the solution is moderate regional pricing, discount the game (say no more than 50%) but not so much that it is a incredibly good deal worth doing the whole VPN thing over.
if it's more work than its worth most people wont bother.
youtube is being dumb and not letting me comment what i want so i'll just say that it's great you're talking about this since it's a really important topic, i really wish i could play uni2 but no regional pricing means that's probably not happening until it starts going on big sales in a few years
Luckily UNI 2 will probably be on sale within the next few months actually being that Melty did the same. But it sucks to start a small fighting game late like this. Sorry YT is being weird but if you want, you can DM me on Twitter or Discord and I could make a community post or something ab the games you wanted to mention
@@qmanchu nah it's fine, i can do without shilling a bunch of games i like, though one thing i do want to shout out is the website nuuvem, an official key reseller from brazil that sometimes has regional prices for games that don't have them on steam, they don't have every game unfortunately but it's still worth checking out
@@qmanchu nah it's fine, i can do without shilling a bunch of games i like, though one thing i do want to shout out is nuuvem, an official key reseller from brazil that sometimes has regional prices for games that don't have them on steam, they don't have every game unfortunately but it's still worth checking out
@@qmanchu nah it's fine, i can do without shilling a bunch of games i like, though one thing i do want to shout out is the website nuuvem, an official key seller from brazil that sometimes has regional prices for games that don't have them on steam
@@qmanchu nah it's fine, i can do without shilling a bunch of games i like, though i would like to talk about nuuvem but it seems like that's what's being blocked by youtube for some reason
I'm brazillian, no regional pricing for granblue fantasy versus rising is infuriating... I bought the game by other means and got a discount, it went for 38 dolars but the game here costs around 56 dolars. I'm waiting for project L to change the situation of the brazillian FGC.
True
8:50 a Fairbairn Films fan!
I'm from Brazil. Nowadays a AAA game on release costs around 350 Reais, which, if you only convert from the US currency to ours, actually sounds about right, but when you take into consideration that that's almost 1/3 of our minimum wage, it becomes clear that most people rarely buy these games on release (or even have the latest console to begin with). The PS5, for instance, on release costs almost 5x the minimum wage.
That said, I think it's so funny to think that some people in the US get mad that new games cost 70 bucks for them nowadays. I mean yeah sure it sucks it's *10 dollars* more expensive, but they honestly have it easy over there lol.
If we take into consideration that both Brazil and the US's minimum wage are somewhat similar, that means we have to pay for one game over half of what they pay for a brand new console.
I don't mean to sound like I'm saying Americans shouldn't complain about this stuff, but standing from my point of view I just think a lot of people take this stuff for granted without having any idea of what happens outside their bubble.
This is great context that I think is lost on a lot of people. The idea that the cost of games is just so inflated against everything else around the gaming space
It also depends on the law of each country, in México we have specific laws for the pricing of digital products while other countries dont
Actually current president funny enough wanted to put laws to elevate the prices of games here cuz he sees them as an evil thing for the younger generation (he's super religious) it was actually a controversy that started from his son playing fortnite a lot
No top tiers, TODs, corner pressure or mixups are scarier than *the economy.*
Fantastic tagline tbh
Dnf duel didn’t have a reception problem…check the charts. The issue was 8ing or whoever taking a million years to update then killing the game.
Anyways yeah fgc is so annoying in how behind it is. Pricing, monetary models, UI/UX, kind of everything
I didn't say reception, i said keeping people captivated. Which is what you mentioned. People just lost interest because of the lack of updates in terms of patches and DLC.
It did struggle with reception in places where they couldn't afford it tho, which doubly hurt the game
Retention?
Hopefully copyright claims aren't coming after you for the Always Sunny bits lol
Great illumination on this subject, though; I've had online friends in different countries excited to get in on several new fighting games in the last couple years, only to dejectedly sit out when they're inevitably priced high as all hell.
The theme song is proving to be more of a trouble than I expected lmao. I'll figure it out before long tho
And then, there's us cubans who can't even pay for any game bcs we don't have international credit cards, so the only way we can play anything is via piracy (and even if we could, the average salary of a cuban is around 30$ a month)
Wow I had no clue this was a thing
@@qmanchu Sadly it is, that's the reason behind why you've probably never seen a cuban (resident) on any fgc tournaments or any other paid games. The only games we can play online are free to play games like DotA or LoL
In general the situation of fgs in underdeveloped countries is complicated. And it gets much worse to the "low class" games below SF, MK and TK, with the playerbase issue. Another layer of problems is brought by 3rd world average internet services. And naturally the game netcode. (Which gladly made big improvements for all games lately, but it was bad in general) And the fact that every game has dlc seasons, and big games like SF and TK can go really far with dlc seasons... And missing dlc in this fg genre means missing a lot (it's their strategy to sell after all). So the total spendings in a single game will be much more painful and heavy in the underde country than elsewhere (where it also hurts).
That way It's easy to see console gamers being very mindful about investing in this genre... when there are other games that can be entertaining enough and are not as much expensive even with their dlc included (thinking about the total costs of a modern fg from the base release to every single dlc until the end). At least whoever can afford fgs will prefer to stick to SF, or maybe two games, instead of the more "1st world" habit of buying everything that comes out.
Hopefully with granblue and Project L F2P fighting games becomes a thing, in a 3rd world country even 20 bucks is to high for a FG, and tbey launch costing 260+(around 1/4 of a min wage) in my country.
Casual Players simply won't buy them for this values while games like Valorant/League etc are played by everyone I know
Even for free players are reluctant to play them by the unconvencional gameplay the price just kills it for sure.
And the modern dlc practice, that dominates the entire genre now, guarantees that people will have to spend several times the price of the base game in order to have the complete roster. When you buy a recent fg that already has to be in mind... In practice the "real game" price is not $60-70, this is just the "entry". Also in this genre, refusing to pay dlc means missing a lot. Like, SF5's complete roster is almost 3x the size of the launch roster. And that also happens in other games... Too much of the roster is reserved to dlc. The only difference is that some games don't have long dlc runs, only SF and TK go very long, while other games have usually 3 seasons.
anyone know if pakistani players are able to afford tekken 8?
I've noticed the tekken 7 player count hasn't gone down by much
70$ is a insane price as a American, Considering that there's no shipping costs ect with the lack of physical media... Game's should be way cheeper (Also holy hell, a 70$ game here is only 35$ in Brazil?? I should just buy my game's from Brazil)
What happened at 15:16?😂
I like the whole big mac analogy 😂 I always get a measure of a country's pricing by checking the price on a can of coke
* laughs in refillable Mexican glass bottles *
@@wakkaseta8351 that's another indicator, refillable glass bottles would indicate cheap production costs and pricing
Why the re-upload?
Copyright issues on Always Sunny Theme
I wish game were cheaper here in Brazil, blizzard is one of the worst culprits. Diablo 4 is around 350 brl (basic edition) which is around 70 dollars. However the base income in Brazil in a month is 1302 brl (262,50 dollars) think about it, a fucking game costs around 26-27% of your monthly income. We used to have a fisical place for blizzard here, until they've fired everyone, took away popular payment options, "dollarizing" the prices in games and reducing customer support to a bare minimum....
2XKO will probably be a game changer in competitive esports not only being accessible, but having a chance to make tournaments with 2 people on each side, if we ever get to that stage I want people to see our crowd cheering with all our hearts!!!
Money is a big deal no matter where you are, but when you have an expensive hobby...it won't be affordable for all.
Everyone can steal, but everyone won't. Otherwise our hobby would be dead.
Collabin?! The Q strikes again.
Piracy is regularly the answer though dude, sorry. These companies aren't struggling, they are screwing over people, nickle and diming everything. I pay for things when I can, and then they take my games and content from me. If i don't own the things I buy, then piracy isn't stealing. If a product earns my money (which i generally don't have because I'm disabled) then they'll get it at some point, but otherwise if something exists in the world and i'm not taking more than someones gamble on the idea that they'll make money or not, I'm going to pirate it. I didn't take anything from anyone, they counted their chickens before they hatched.
DNF Duel was free on EGS for a while though. lol
Yeah and that version of the game has tons of issues so it still managed to not be worth it lol
Hm, okay, I thought it was the same as the Steam one. Bummer.
I tried it and it seemed to work fine. Online was smooth, too.
@@qmanchu
Hm, I wasn't aware. It ran fine for me, both offline and online.
Also, YT ate my comment or smth. smh@@qmanchu
For indie and multiplayer games buyt and buy physical or GOG copies so you actually own them for everything else theres the open seas ;3
Why not just pirate them all instead of having double standards?
🏴☠️
It makes no sense to me that fighting games which are all about multiplayer are paid games.... At very least a mutliplayer part of the game should be free in order to create a healthy online population... Especially since f2p has proven over and over to be more profitable than paid releases so even from the business perspective it's to a bizarre choice.
More profitable and more predatory. I'd rather not have to deal with batlle passes, gacha, and FOMO.
Cygames recently changed GBVSR's regional pricing, making it a bit more affordable overall in areas like LATAM. Still could be better though.
Meanwhile DNF Duel is still lacks proper regional pricing and is still at full launch price. GBVSR's old pricing was still cheaper than DNF Duel.
I don't understand Nexon's logic, nobody is buying this.
I just wanna correct since it's related to the topic an average Mexican would have to work 10 days to get MK1 due to the minimun wage (wich is 90% of the pay you'll get anywhere here) and that's if you dont spend money on ANYTHING rather than the game, that's why no one here bothers to play anything than KoF
Yeah the numbers I went off of were basically census numbers but those hardly provide the full truth.
@@qmanchuthat's understandable and doesn't take from the quality of the video, i just stumbled upon your channel and im liking your videos a lot and the guests you have featured were a really nice bonus as i also follow them, i hope you grow a lot, you talk about really interesting topics and im a Mexican lawyer who also runs a local fgc so if you make another video like the KoF in México one i can provide any info you want.
Im an instant fan let's watch you succeed 🎉
@kawamaster6006 I appreciate feedback! I really do. It helps because I wanna portray these stories as best I can. Do you have discord? I'd love to connect. My account is the same as this YT channel name
All games in arab word snd in mena is and example use innsaudi 259 mean 69 usd arab we have procing good
Street Fighter x Tekken? Of course you can play it on PC. I've had it for months now. You just have to know where to download it lol
I thought first that I clicked on a wrong video😂😂
I've been wanting to do a video on economic stuff for a while so the intro part was me just flexing that for myself
@@qmanchu was very interesting 👍
Steam removing regional pricing from argentina doesnt fix anything, people are just gonna region switch to the next cheapest region to buy games from, and the problem is gonna repeat all over again until Steam takes drastic measures, if they ever do.
That's the thing, these measures have already been put in place. But also even with what you just said, there's no reason for the games to be more expensive in places like Argentina than they are in the states.
But I do understand your point as that is a big part of the problem
Smaller devs usually respect suggested pricing but then theres Capcom and Bandai namco who just dont care at all. The removal of regional pricing was 100% because people region switching to buy on the cheap, French Bread even sent a notice on Melty blood's news feed on steam about this being the reason.
Btw my previous comment wasnt in response to your video, it just just randomly mentioning this issue since it might be related.
Love the video and glad someone finally put this issue in the spotlight.
Regional price is cancer. if you can't pay for your hobby. Look for another one o go to piracy. Regional price need to be ilegal for every country
Ngl I say make everyone pay the same amount and just let piracy happen. It's insulting that they charge Americans more for the same product. In no other industry does this occur except digital goods which are functionally free to reproduce. The difference between games and big macs is that generally it actually costs less money to produce and distribute the big mac in poorer countries. For games, the dev provides the game AT NO ADDITIONAL COST TO THEMSELVES regardless of how much they charge. Selling a big mac in the USA will inherently cost more than Thailand due to differences in labor costs.
Further it's because creating new copies of a game has no real cost that piracy is not "stealing" as you say in 14:03. Piracy is often the correct answer if the DRM is intrusive and causes a worse experience, i.e. the launch resident evil 8 performance issues caused by DRM.
Great points! Honestly impressive you could convey this so well with just a YT comment
Why ise arab countrh most arab country have reigonal procing and big fgc scene
The truth is that fgs really stopped being a "humble" gaming entertainment maybe since the PS3 gen. And that reality was truly set beyond any doubt in the dlc era of the genre. Like, not everything had dlc in the PS3 gen, but dlc was definitely normalized in the PS4 gen. Then fgs became an expensive entertainment... given the total spendings that go in a single title (launch price + every dlc). Probably among the most expensive console (mainly) gaming genres now. And it's hard to avoid all that since dlc doesn't only involve silly cosmetics, but rather most of the roster. In the case of some games, the total dlc package of characters will be much bigger than the base roster roster size. That's their strategy of course.
I mean FGs are overpriced for how bare bones they are, even disregarding the regional shenanigans.
Fgs stopped being a humble gaming entertainment maybe since the PS3 gen. And that reality was truly set beyond any doubt in the dlc era of the genre. Not everything had already dlc in the PS3 gen, but dlc was normalized in the PS4 gen. Then fgs became an expensive entertainment, given the total spendings that go in a single title (launch price + every dlc). Probably among the most expensive gaming genres now. And it's hard to avoid that since this dlc doesn't only involve silly cosmetics, but rather most of the roster. In the case of some games, the total dlc package of characters will be much bigger than the base roster roster size.
I don’t get why fighting game aren’t just free-to-play now. And when I saw now, I mean post 2010, post League of Legends, they should’ve went free-to-play. Take something like Marvel vs Capcom 3...both versions come out in 2011, total sales across both versions and 9 years is 4,120,000, and they weren’t selling all those at full price (2,100,000 of that total is Ultimate, which released as a discount game; and when it was going to be removed from Xbox Live and PSN in 2013 it was marked down to $9.99) so it’s hard to nail down what it exactly it did. Although it is easy to tell what it didn’t do. Now 4,120,000 isn’t that much, and looking at other free-to-play fighting games it could be assumed it could’ve easily surpassed that number, and having the Marvel licenses I’m sure would’ve helped. For comparison, MultiVersus had 20 million players in a month, and that Brawlhalla game nobody talks about celebrated 100 million players last year. If a traditional fighting game could also pull those kinds of numbers, that’s a whole hell of a lot of people you could sell DLC to. And if DLC was priced at like .50¢ a costume and a $1.00 a character, (or be unlocked by playing the game) you could likely have players pumping in money like they did in arcades during the peak years of fighting games. If a F2P Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3 had a player base of 20 million, and half of them bought all 50 of the character’s alt costumes, that’d be $250 million dollars...which is more than Capcom made selling MVC3 over almost a decade.
To me it’s just bizarre a company like Capcom hasn’t moved into the free-to-play market with fighting games given Capcom made a fortune on people pumping quarters into arcade machines to play Street Fighter 2. That kind of low pricing would also go a long way in foreign markets where a game might get hit with some absurd price, and being free, while other games might have some absurd price in some area would only further drive players to your product instead of someone else’s. It’s also weird given Capcom very clearly seems to think the way to make money on their fighting games is with the DLC, but being a traditional retail game means the pool of people to sell DLC to is going to be vastly smaller. Not being F2P also cuts into the pool of people that can play online since on consoles you’ve got to pay extra to play online if the game isn’t F2P. A small pool of players playing online means it’s going to be harder and harder to find online matches as time goes on, which means people are more likely to leave the game, which means the company doesn’t have people to sell that DLC to. The way they’re pricing DLC now also means only a small percentage of the total players they’ve got are even going to buy it. Like I wouldn’t be surprised if like only 1% or less of the 3 million people that bought Street Fighting 6 are buying everything. But even if it was 10%, they could still make vastly more selling DLC costumes for vastly less to the vastly more people they’d have playing the game if the price of admission was nothing.
The level of commercial success of SF, MK and TK in the PS4 and PS5 gens (even more in the PS5 gen) will never convince these three companies to go F2P.
But honestly, for everyone else I don't know... it might be a way to stay competitive in the current times. Companies like SNK can't even afford to make games with the high quality graphics standards of those 3 bigger games, and spend on an elaborated cinematic story mode, etc.
If Arc Systems makes another high level project with a huge 3rd party franchise (like DBFZ) then they will be safe. But the next GG, that is their own franchise, I don't know if it will be able to perform well. I mean, GGST took a lot of "timing" advantages... The burnout of SF5 and TK7, that had even stopped dlc updates, and the selling point of rollback, etc. Now that SF6 is new and very popular it's hard to take advantage of similar situations. Maybe GG will be sold for a lower price at the very least.
@@carlosaugusto9821 Street Fighter 5 and Tekken 7 didn’t really have a great level of success last gen. Street Fighter 5 sold less than Street Fighter 4, and Tekken 7 is only technically Bandai Namco‘s best selling console release because of the extraordinary amount of time they went without releasing another one. It took Tekken 7 six years to top Tekken 3, where Tekken 3 was followed by Tekken Tag Tournament on the PS2 two years later, and then Tekken 4 came two years after that.
Mortal Kombat doesn’t need to go free-to-play. They’d probably make a killing if they did. But NetherRealm Studios normally releases a new fighting game every two years, and the MK ones at least sell over 10 million within that time. MK11 was out longer (probably because of COVID) but even that was less time than stuff like Tekken 7 and Street Fighter 6. Although technically NetherRealm does do F2P with their iOS games. Smash Bros is in that same boat too. Ultimate sold over 32 million on a single console that seems to have 116 million active users. But with Street Fighter and Tekken, the only way I could see them getting 15 million users, or 32 million users, or more is by going free-to-play...and if the idea is to make money by selling the users things like DLC costumes, having 30 million, 50 million, or 100 million users is going to greatly increase how much money you’re pulling in on DLC in comparison to how much you’ll get if the total sales of your game are just 7.40 million and 10 million. Free-to-play would also mean all their users would be online, which would keep more players within the game’s ecosystem longer, which would make it easier to sell DLC to them.
Here’s a little game.
Let’s say Capcom release Marvel vs Capcom 3 as a F2P game back in 2011. Let’s say that back in 2011 it had 15 million users. That’s a couple million more people than bought Smash Bros. on the Wii, and still less than half (around 43%) of Xbox 360 users that had Xbox Live in 2011. Marvel vs Capcom 3 by the end of 2011 had 50 characters. Since this hypothetical MvC3 is making its money on DLC, let’s say instead of just one alt costume everyone has five alt costumes. Let’s say a quarter of the user base buys all the costumes which are set a .50¢ a pop, that’d be $468,750,000. Even if every copy of Street Fighter 5 sold at full price, which it didn’t, that’d still be more money than Capcom made selling SF5. Let’s also say the game has a routine roster of 20 characters (10 Marvel, 10 Capcom) you can pick at any time; you can unlock them by just playing the game, but you can also unlock a character for a buck. I’m going to play things conservatively and say the 1.40 million people (that’s how much Ultimate sold, which is about a million less than Fate of Two World) just drop the $50 ($38 at first) over the first year just to get everyone playable right off the bat, it’d basically be like buying the game anyways; that would net Capcom an extra $70 million. In actuality if there were something like 15 million people playing for free, and you could essentially buy Fate of Two Worlds for $38, there’d likely be way more people buying it than the total combined sales of MvC3 sales today. So there’s $538.75 million, over half a billion they could make. And that’s some they could maybe make within the first year of the game coming out. That also wouldn’t be total money, it’s just two factors. I’m sure the vast majority of the player base would likely buy some DLC costumes if the price to get them was extreme low. You might have at least 95% of players buying whatever on a whim if the whim is only pocket change. If you had 15 million players, and 95% spent only $10 (could be like 20 costumes) you’d still pull in 142.5 million, which is also more money than Fate of Two Worlds could’ve made. I’m saying a lot of shit, and I’m throwing a lot of numbers out there, but I think these are all lowball numbers. People might think twice about throwing five bucks at a single character skin, but I don’t think they would think twice about throwing fifty cents at a single character skin and ultimately end up spending five bucks anyways...and at that price they may do that every other week or something until that have almost everything since it’s not that much they’re spending at any one time anyways. There’s also the chance going free-to-play could completely backfire. But I think any free-to-play fighting game that prices it’s costumes like a game of Street Fighter 2 was priced back in the old arcade days could easily pull in more than a billion dollars. And I double Capcom and Bandai Namco are pulling in a billion bucks with their fighting games and how they’re pricing their DLC. There’s also the chance to make exponentially more money. Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3 came out 9 months after Fate of Two Worlds, with 12 new characters. What if a F2P Marvel vs Capcom 3 never went away, it was still going today, and every span of nine months had 12 characters released? That’d be 192 more characters, (with extra costumes to buy) and while not everyone would do it, you’d probably have at least a few million people just buying characters the moment they dropped.
"coughing sounds" Actually as a Mexican I can confirm, that price for MK1 is before taxes, with taxes it's actually 69.99 usd (DNF Duel does cost 49.99 usd after taxes here), games used to be a little cheaper here but our current asshole of a president introduced a new tax for video games and digital services, so it was 50.00 usd on like 2020 or 2019 I don't remember exactly.
Also your estimate on us taking two days to earn enough to buy the game on average, it depends, the minimum wage here is 248.93 pesos mexicanos (14.48usd on today's exchange rate) for a whole day of work, now calculating the average here is hard because there is a lot, and I do mean a lot of people who earn below the minimum wage, even if it's illegal, I think the average would be around twice the minimum wage, so around 30.00 usd for a whole day of work, so yeah I guess you are right, on average it would be around 2 days to earn enough to buy a new game, but still to most of young people it would take 3 or even 4 days to earn enough to buy a new game.
Anyway now you know a little more about our economy lol.
Yeah Angel Freak told me about how vastly the income ranges to the point where an average means almost nothing. But I just went by national number's for the sake of contrast based on steams numbers. He mentioned a lot about how it realistically takes weeks for many to actually buy a game like this.
Thanks for sharing friend, learning is what we're here to do and I really appreciate it
What macdonalds has to do with the FCG?
Watch the video to find out.
Uni 2 currently is seling at 250 R$. It's ridiculous to have a game cost that much, specially one i likely won't be able to find people to play with outside of discord ina few months.
The conversation about piracy always reminds me of this short: ruclips.net/user/shorts44Do5x5abRY?si=-lnw2j5-1CgkCaoK
Edit: just realized you used the same video I pasted here. But honestly. I don't agree with this being such a complicated issue and both sides having equally valid points. The rollback situation serves as an example imo. Players had been vocal for years about how bad the online experience was, and companies always dismissed them and their complaints until it took a worldwide pandemic spanning two years to actually force companies into acknowledging the issue and surprise surprise, nowadays even old titles are getting rollback and it became a core feature. There's a huge imbalance of forces between companies and consumers, and companies won't ever take action unless forced to. Players are allowed to play the game through whatever means necessary, and if the companies don't agree with the means used, then it's on them to make the game more accessible
I agree that this is mostly an imbalance towards the players and I don't even really think the large companies have a valid point in not localizing prices. Only a small percentage of people pirate when they have reasonable means as the evidence suggests. I mostly mentioned it because a lot of people aren't aware of how many companies got taken advantage of for this in the past. With modern technology though, I'm pretty sure there's ways to prevent such exploits, especially if it's only agadir 1-3% of players.
You're right that it's very similar to the rollback problem which is why I wanna get as many eyes on this as possible
Funny fact: GGST DLCs Passes used to cost R$43.00 in Brazil. Season 3 costs R$107.00. The game itself is costing R$173.99 full price. The same goes with SF6 having R$259.99 full price, while 2 DLCs characters are costing around R$60.00.
Our minimum monthly wage is R$1412.00; the average value of our monthly shopping for food is almost R$400.00; while our expenses with taxes are close R$300.00 or more when we talk about water and electric energy.
Honestly, we can't afford those games if we can't actually buy ourselves food. Steam jsed to put those prices around R$160.00 and it still expensive but not that much how it is nowadays with R$260.00 for ONE game.
Just hope we can see a future where we can be free to consume culture with reasonable local pricing.