For the longest time, being a gamer in a lower income region like Argentina, Brazil, Russia, Turkey, etc. meant that 99 times out of 100 you probably pirated your games, with the developers seeing exactly about zero cents for their work. Physical copies were either unavailable or extremely costly, which meant that most brick and mortar stores actually carried pirated copies burned on CD’s or DVD’s, and once the Internet became accessible enough, people moved on to directly getting their entertainment from popular torrent trackers or piracy blogs.
Obviously that’s not something anyone should be proud of, or anything that can be celebrated. Game developers spend countless hours making videogames and pirated copies don’t make them a cent, which isn’t how things should work. The issue is that if a game costs sixty (or nowadays even seventy!) dollars in the USA, it costing the exact same amount of cash (or sometimes even more) in a country like Argentina where a teacher’s salary hovers around 400 dollars a month doesn’t really work out. It’s less a case of people wanting to resort to piracy because they are heartless monsters, and more of a situation where the asking price is ridiculously high and the alternative isn’t directly hurting anyone even if it’s “morally wrong”.
The solution to this issue is to analyze costs of living, wages, etc. and implement prices that are affordable in lower income countries, while also preventing “richer” customers from “region jumping” into these other regions, as that could result in a net loss for videogame developers and publishers. Why bother? Well, if someone can afford to pay US$20-30 for your US$60 digital download of a game, isn’t that massively better than them paying you zero dollars and obtaining a pirated copy off a torrent site? It’s not like digital games are a finite product where selling it for less money in a lower income region means you can sell less copies in the USA, Great Britain, France, Germany, etc. And there was a company that saw the potential to turn “lost” regions into actual customers, and as you might have guessed if you know anything about the history of PC gaming in the past twenty years or so, that company was Valve.
While the rise of Steam as the preferred online storefront for a not insignificant number of PC gamers worldwide didn’t immediately fix the problem, deep discounts and innovative sale events that awarded coupons and other means of getting games got people in regions like mine (Argentina) interested in the concept of actually owning our titles through a legit retailer and not just as pirated downloads or burned physical media. Valve then started experimenting with regional pricing in Russia and other regions, which eventually extended to a fair amount of countries, and with their in-house economists, they mostly provided pricing recommendations that made sense for those of us who live in lower income regions, while crucially also doing all the legwork themselves and offering these pricing recommendations to developers so they could choose to implement them or not.
And guess what? It worked! (for a while at least). I’ve seen countless friends who used to get anything they wanted to play from their favorite trackers dropping that “lifestyle” and turning into paying customers over the first two or three years that we had regional pricing and regional currency support on Steam. Sadly, living in a country with a fairly unstable economy meant that Valve’s recommendations should have been updated more frequently than they actually were, so prices eventually became “too low” and unscrupulous individuals started jumping through hoops to take advantage of lower prices while not actually residing in these lower income regions. This mostly resulted in a “hidden arms race” where Valve would implement changes that disallowed gifting if the recipient was in a region that had a bigger than 10% price difference, and also enabled all sorts of region locking. Their latest tool in this unsung war was to restrict payments so people living in Argentina for instance could only pay for their games with local payment systems, but we all took it in the chin even when the act of buying a new game wasn’t as painless as it’d been when first introduced, because we understood their reasons for it.
Of course, when people start doing shady stuff like region jumping for a cheaper price there’s always a loser (or multiple, in this case). The first loser was game developers and publishers who saw these region jumpers as people getting their games for a significant “discount” and applied the same logic people tend to apply to piracy (that all of these “discounted sales” would have been full price purchases, and so they were losing massive amounts of cash, something I would dispute, but there’s no point because anyone deploying that kind of logic isn’t really interested in listening). This phenomenon coincided with a fairly high jump in the number of games being released on Steam each month, which also led to smart people jumping on that train and starting to include horror stories about region jumpers in their game developer newsletters, or to amplify Twitter discourse about the matter, just at a key moment where indie developers worldwide were rightfully concerned about the sustainability of the industry they were a part of.
The second loser (and at least from my point of view as someone who is directly affected by this issue) was all the people who live in lower income regions such as Turkey or Argentina, and then saw Valve decide to stop supporting our local currencies, citing high inflation rates and hard to predict changes, and turn back to US dollars. This meant that they issued new pricing recommendations for the region, but since most big publishers were already ignoring their previous ones, thinking they were “losing money”, they promptly did the same for these new guidelines, and that’s how now we get Ubisoft releases for US$48 instead of US$60 (Valve recommends US$27) or EA games for a cool US$70 among other examples. What often feels even more insulting is that often there’s someone at these companies adjusting their prices to be slightly below USA pricing and going “yeah, that’ll do” when the target audience earns a fraction of the money someone doing the same job would earn in the US or another developed country.
Can you guess who the third loser is in this case? I’ll give you a hint, the same people who are now choosing to not engage with regional pricing recommendations. Why? Simple, regions that had over time converted lifelong digital pirates into paying customers are now seeing all that progress revert quicker than it came to be, simply because most people who live in a place like Argentina or Turkey can’t afford to pay US prices for their videogames. And sure, you can take the “moral high ground” and decide that they should just go without the games, since after all, they are just entertainment and there’s free legal alternatives, etc. But the reality is that videogames are a massive part of our cultural makeup nowadays, and people don’t want to be excluded from that just because most big publishers are too blind to see the damage they are causing to their own industry. As part of our global cultural heritage, games should be as accessible as possible, and we had (and have) tools to ensure that’s the case, but sadly it seems the pendulum is increasingly swinging in the other direction.
Time will tell if things will change, meanwhile executives can pat themselves in the back thinking they got a quick buck for their big megacorporation, and Internet grifters who make their living manufacturing discontent amongst the people who should understand the issue the clearest (indie developers) will sleep soundly as they search for the next easy target to “create” outrage clicks.