kohlrak: Regional pricing for reasons other than the legal costs for copyright/trademark registration is pretty asenine. The question, though, is why such things cost as much anywhere if they can be sold cheaply in some ares to begin with. In effect, either i'm paying an extra 25(130R$) bucks for 60(300R$) dollar game for no reason, or i'm paying 30(150R$) bucks for a 60 dollar (300R$) game to offset someone else only having to pay 10(50R$) bucks. I don't think either scenario is right, because i may not be in a 3rd world country, but i'm not exactly Bill Gates, either. Alot of people in Brazil have more money than I do at any given moment (not to call Brazil entitled or anything, just that this notion of determining one's wealth based on location is hardly accurate: for context, my bank account has about 300R$ according to xe.com, and it's probably going to drop to about 25R$ per month, and not rise at all until october or december when it might rise by about 1.5kR$ at most). I'm curious what these games are actually worth.
KetobaK: It's quite complicate kohIrak, the regional prices are there to set a competitive and fair price for every game depending on the region they are selling it, they take in count, life expenses, average salary and other taxes,
Which makes no sense, 'cause it's not fair. Within a country like the US you can get areas that are way, way more affluent than other areas. Some people i've spoken to before in Brazil have found amusement that my area in particuar is comparable to some parts of Brazil, and they seemed to have the most amusement for things like the road conditions in particular. The whole notion is insane.
this help a lot to avoid piracy because we can contribute with a fair price accordingly to our life style. For example, here in Argentina, we paid 65% on top of the price, that means that a us$60 games cost us us$100... Now, our average salary is us$400 (and droping), now I ask you if it will be fair to ask you for 1/4 of your entire salary to purchase a game, will you pay it? That would be a fair price for you?
And that's why I kept a netbook running for 10 years, when it was already considered low tier the moment it was released (and intentionally so to keep it cheap). Now i'm using something that cost me 400USD. I plan on using this until at least 2030. As for the additonal price in particular, that should not be the game dev's fault, but something those of you in argentina do something about. I'm sure it's not simple, but this is not my responsibility. Either i'm paying more to make up for you, or i'm paying more when the product isn't really worth said price. To pay significantly higher than it's worth is unfair, regardless of how much you make. When i buy games on GOG or elsewhere, i have to see them as long term investments, because the average weekly pay for my area is probably round 200USD (i'm not sure if you are talking about what timeframe your choice of word "salary" is based on, 'cause normally we mean yearly, but if
these numbers are to be believed it's certainly worse on average than the US, but not what people in our respective countries think it is). Based on working 40 hours a week (which is the average, and it's hard to get more or less), the average hourly wage in my area is supposedly 20USD an hour (honestly, all the open jobs are offering half that, but i'm thinking they're averaging types of positions rather than basing it on individual positions [for example, if you weight store clerk with CEO, it'll go between, because you're adding average then dividing by 2, where as if you go by number of positions you know there's easily 20-40 store clerks for every ceo of a small corporation]). And that's just my area: Pennsylvania on the whole is one of the poorer states in the US, but there are still even worse parts of this country like Detroit.
Don't get me wrong, i'm sympathetic to the fact argentina is worse off, but i noticed those south of the US border have a very, very inflated view of what goes on in the US. Hondurans tend to be particularly interesting cases. I hear that they tend to lie to their family back in Honduras, 'cause no one believes them when they tell them the truth. And no one wants to talk about the trail of tears that Hondurans go through to get to the US when they're told they're going through official channels (hint: they're not). The US is the modern day El Dorado, and just like El Dorado, you don't see any streets lined with gold. Then you got some parts of the US where they have money to do some of the craziest things, or at least they think they have the money, then they have trouble keeping the people living in tents and cardboard boxes from crowding those expensive projects and "making them look ugly with their presence."
That actually help us a lot to support developers, maybe not much, but is better than nothing and despite the help that represent regional pricing we more than often paid more than the real price, GOG didn't add regional pricing on Argentina yet.
I'm skeptical on how much it supports devs. Usually, they're salary or hourly, not commission. It's just some corporate kitty.
EDIT: At my last job, I had this crazy fool who was working over 8 hour shifts with maybe 1 day off per week for about a month or two just so he could buy Fallout 4.