Care to tackle my arguments above? The truth is, regional pricing is more or less per country, not region. And, this goes back to, if someone else can buy it cheaper, why can't i? Either i'm paying more than i need to to begin with (which is bad enough) or i'm paying more than i should so that i help offset someone else getting cheaper (in other words, it's more expensive for me because it's cheaper for someone else).

It should be obvious that NISA's just being greedy, but that doesn't change my arguments on the topic as a whole.

well i havent read your comment yet , just topic name and last comment :)

wish it was per country , germany has way better wages then the eastern eu countries
publishers want profit max probably, if they could, they would set prices personally to what you would pay maximum, and with regional pricing they can get better income than with one global price

yeah, this seems unfair for you if you live in a rich country, but you still pay way less in % income than the poor country guy in average

they not only get it cheaper, they live in a poorer country, it is not just a price difference, oh and probably they don't get the product on their mother language

nah, you are not paying more if someone pays less, think about them as extra customers or on sale, I maybe wrong, but proving this would require plenty of comparison on similar product sold with regional pricing and one global price, that will be hard to make if possible for games

I think they first set a global price to, then they set a lower regional price if they think the more sales will outweigh the less profit/item
and they have to take into account for local laws and tax differences ,fe here VAT is 27% yep insane , what is it in the usa 10%?:O looks like you even pay less than us poorer countries that's unfair :)

oh and price of a product hardly resembles its production cost, except in very competitive market with similar product ,price is what people willing to pay for them

What if you live in a poor part of a rich country that's poorer than the average of a poor country? What about the rich in a poor country? What if you're in a rich part of a rich country, but you have a terribly poor job with no hope for vertical movement? We can take this even longer if you'd like. This isn't about fairness at all, as we all know those corporations don't give a damn about what's fair. So we now give discounts if we can't translate? Does that mean that I should bug over half the devs on dlsite for a discount 'cause Japanese is not my mother tongue? What about a discount, instead of a price hike, for the shoddy english translations we get from NISA in the first place? That's the thing, we don't know what it really is. It's plain and simple, if someone is paying 7 euros, and anothe person is paying 50 euros, and this is a "permanent sale" based on "region," then clearly the person paying 50 is paying more than they should have ot. Either the company can afford to sell it to everyone at 7 euros, or it's valued somewhere between the two numbers and the person paying 50 is making up for the people paying 7 so that the average price comes out to what it's really worth. Now, of course, this is far more complicated, but that's what it is at the fundamental level, it's either situation A or B, and neither of them is fair either. Bingo: they sell things based on what they think you'll be dumb enough to pay, as demonstrated by the fact it's digital goods, not physical goods, so aside from certain costs per sale (which do exist for things like unity), once the production threshhold has been passed, they're just making sales on no work, because it costs nothing to produce another copy of the game for the publisher (the platform has some minor energy and bandwidth costs that amount to less than a single amount of the smallest unit of whatever the least valuable currency is). Yes, because an extra 45% of 10 whatevers resulting in 15 (round to your benefit) is still larger than the 50 with no tax (to round down to your benefit again). Don't get me wrong, the VAT is horrible, but it's not only not the company's fault/responsibility, but it's also insignificant compared to the regional price differences that we usually see. Exactly, which is what makes the people crying about the unfairness of universal pricing even worse: it's not a product that they need and it's up to them what they're willing to pay for it. There's lots of games i won't even add to a wishlist because they'd need a 90% off level sale before i'd consider their prices reasonable for what they're offering. This doesn't entitle you to piracy, because you don't agree to the price. Even making such a claim is a crime known as "extortion."

Personally, i'd rather things be cheaper for everyone, but this whole pseudo-communist argument for regional pricing due to presumed economic opportunity (wealth ridistribution by another name) is just as flawed as real communism.

Some points to clarify what has been said here:

1- In Brazil, regional prices are rarely linked to physical media! In fact, Nintendo Switch, Playstation and XBOX online stores do not have regional prices as standard;

2- Regional prices are applied forcefully and massively ONLY in digital PC distribution, ie: Steam, Epic and GOG;

3- It has already been mentioned here and I thought it was excellent to have said it. In addition to us (Brazilians) paying an absurd amount for a release, the translation into our language is something very recent, and the dubbing even more so. We grew up in the 1990s and throughout the 2000s playing foreign language content without local support and warranty, so when someone says "it's unfair to pay less than I pay" I ask if you think it's fair for me to pay for your dubbing, your subtitles , your support and your warranty;

4- The value of the minimum wage in Brazil is R$1,045.00. A Nintendo digital media release costs R$300.00. Do you know what that means? That a launch in Brazil costs almost 1/3 of the minimum wage. This is completely insane! I really can't understand how someone can find this "okay" and complain about regional prices when their reality, even with several problems, is not even close to that;

5- The logic of regional prices, in my opinion, is not linked to "one pays more and the other pays less", at all. They are made precisely to prevent piracy in vulnerable locations, but more than that, it has to do with the BUYING POWER of each location. You're not paying more for me to pay less, because the practice of regional prices is a new reality, don't think that this has been happening for years, and as I said, it's a reality practically only experienced by PC gamers.

I hope you could have contributed a little to this debate.

ITT: People from affluent countries repeatedly misunderstand the point of regional pricing.

It's easy to speak when you are on the top, with salaries that are way better than a third world country and you don't pay incredible high taxes (cause 65% is a lot, in my country and in anyone), so if you want an universal price, why don't take our prices, tomorrow a game will cost 1/4 of an average salary lets say $300 per game, or 1/2 of a minimum salary, let's say $250, that is fair to you? Imagine how many games they will sale at that pricing. You are not the center of the world, you have to understand that.

R$1,045 an hour?

Per month.

Our federal minimum wage is $7.25/hr. It's higher in some states. R$300 is about $60US and that's what we pay for a AAA game. That's without adding sales tax. Sales tax also varies from state to state. It's usually 5%.

Correct.
Perfect, Ketobak. Absolutely perfect.

Keep in mind americans aren't counting income tax when we talk about our pay. We loose about 3/4 on average. For context, my last job, i was paid better than some people of a higher rank than me, and i could come home with anything between 100 and 500 (US) in a 2-weak period (my hours varied a lot). The cost of living is significantly higher, too, and my paychecks. For my area, the average person is only bringing about 24,000 argentinan pesos home, and rent alone is 12,000. The average cost of transportation (which mean job) is about 8,000 argentinan pesos (my gf is paying for 9000 pesos a week just to have her car, and that's not including insurance and other things like gas so i think that number's a bit out dated, though she actually has a position that comes with a license so she's definitely one of the better paid people around here). That leaves you about 4,000 pesos for food, water, electric, etc. Should be no surprise, but single mothers whom are living alone are getting governmental assistance as a result. That's another cost people don't understand, is the huge cultural difference. When i was working at Empire, the first thing i noticed when visting coworkers from Honduras is that they had multiple families in one home. The way this is offset in the US is that no one is stay-at-home in one of these areas. This is not food, electric, heating, water, legally required insurances (mostly car at this point), or anything else you can think of.

And to convert all these to weekly costs instead of their usual basis (annual or monthly or biweekly) i did downward rounding of all but one of the costs, which is all to the credit of your argument and against mine. And worse yet, it's not rural verses city, because i keep hearing about these "pod people" in new york whom basically have a bed and maybe a table. Not sure what all is going on there, though.

Now, of course, you'll hear about gog users and their massive backlogs, and surely you'll think that this can't be the norm for any of us. Well, obviously there are some richer parts of america, and some poorer parts (i'm definitley in one of the poorer parts), but you'll find most of us are pooling resources together some fancy way to get it. For example, when i worked full time at empire, since it wasn't enough to live off of, i could still live at home, and my father was at one of the better paying jobs (the highest paid around for someone who doesn't have a degree, but it was dangerous work and he has multiple permanent injuries from it), and, seeing the dlc traps, the games as a service, etc comming our way, i considered all my purchases on GOG long-term investments and spent entire paychecks. Between that and all the freebees over the years, I have between 600 and 700 GOG games, maybe about 15 on steam (without counting), and probably about 20 on dlsite. Of course, without that special opportunity of being an absolute freeloader i sure as hell wouldn't have all that, and that's just PC. With GOG going into the shitter the way it is lately, i'm not expecting to buy much more, and if i do it'll be almost all on dlsite, which is way cheaper with games. Until i find a job that will actually pay enough for me to afford basic necessities like rent, food, water, electic, etc (not counting video games etc) i'm also basically only affording based on what moeny that comes to me for this faux covid relief, money people give me 'cause of our holiday mania, etc (which is fine for me, i think it's certainly more than i deserve because i ain't earning a penny of it). I'm certainly one of the most fortunate in my area for a huge number of reasons.

Like i said, though: i wouldn't argue that we're better off, just not nearly as better off as everyone around the world thinks we are. We don't have the economy that we used to have.

There are still no regional prices in GOG for NIS games, prices for South America are absurd in comparison to Steam

If they want to encourage me to purchase games, raising prices isn't going to work.

Honestly all older games should be $5 or less. And if i were purchasing games at this time, i'd wait until sales and preferably 90% off or better.

Base price of "Saviors of Sapphire Wings / Stranger of Sword City Revisited Digital Limited Edition" was around 120 BRL on release. Kinda expensive, but afaik, the price in USD is already kinda high. Now, without discounts, it's costing 346.89 BRL. Even physical Switch games, which tend to be overpriced here, aren't usually as expensive. And most of their games are like that now.

Regional prices are made specifically for countries with weaker currencies. By increasing it so much, they're getting even less sales at best, and piracy for their products will spike at worst.