Bhruic wrote on Feb 27, 2012, 20:39:
And a verification that valve does NOT control prices:
That's verification that Valve doesn't set the actual price, not that Valve isn't responsible for altering prices in different markets. To be clearer, using your example, Mr Goulding might have said "we're going to charge $19.99", but it might have been Valve that set the UK price at £19.99. Or it might not have been, I'm not going to claim it is them, but it seems unlikely that various publishers would bother (or be required to) set prices in every market.
Every other publisher does this for every market already. I gave examples already for books and movies and music. Here's another one I forgot, non game software. You think microsoft doesn't control down to the penny every single country's pricing on MS stuff? Why in the world would a publisher dictate that they control pricing instead of valve in JUST USA ONLY, and let valve do WTF ever they wanted internationally??
And this does NOT only happen digitally. If you read around, a common complaint in Australia especially is how physical retail games exhibit this same price gouging. Valve cannot control physical retail game pricing from other publishers. So that means all the publishers are ALREADY setting international prices for retail copies in every single market. Doing it digitally isn't much more work than they already have to do. Also, most publishers want online digital ones to be similar to physical retail prices. Thats a big reason for the gouging, they've been doing it so long in international markets they figure its an accepted practice and they don't want to cannibalize retail sales with too big of a digital markdown on release.
Bethesda is making twice as much profit on every PC copy of skyrim sold compared to console at similar prices, yet do they discount the PC copy appropriately? One could characterize that as gouging too.
Also, in the UK and a number of european countries, they have something like 20-30% VAT tax added into the price of everything. It still doesn't make up for all the gouging (i.e. publishers are still often gouging another 20%+ on top of the tax after you do currency conversion), but it explains a big percentage of it in some markets.
Prices in the marketplace are far more often set to what market will bear, than having much relation to actual production cost.
This comment was edited on Feb 27, 2012, 20:54.