Why shouldn't prices reflect the exchange rates of the country where the store is based?
What do you personally think is the reason why Steam isn't enforcing their own region restrictions?
The price of anything reflects what the market will stand. Digital pricing is still closely linked to retail pricing, so even assuming that a company like Activision attributed all of its digital sales to its US office the pricing would still vary between regions (and individual countries within a region, where exchange rate might be more relevant) based on the value of the product at retail in that market. The reason why exchange rate is not relevant to the retail price when comparing between regions is that the costs of manufacturing, distributing and selling the product within that region are not related to the value of the dollar against the local currency. Let's say that Activision's main EU office operates out of Germany, manufactures its retail product in Belgium or the Netherlands, and distributes that product all over the EU & UK - their costs are going to be much, much higher than a similarly fictionalized US office operating out of a favorable US state, manufacturing its goods in Mexico and distributing only in North America. At no point does the EU office benefit from the relative strength of the Euro compared to the Dollar, it's just not a relevant factor.
Digital goods don't incur the same costs but they are being sold in the same market, so the pricing must reflect that or you risk devaluing your retail product. If you devalue the retail product, fewer people buy it so retailers make less money and want a bigger cut or they marginalize your shelf space in favor of more profitable products. You manufacture fewer units and the costs increase per unit, you push fewer units to retail and your distribution costs increase because you don't have the guaranteed throughput to make favorable deals. The costs rise, the profits drop and the product is already overpriced compared to your prime competitor which is your own digital product. It would be great if the entire audience went all-digital overnight because we'd surely see a drop in prices and perhaps a more standardized pricing model across regions but that's not going to happen. Until digital distribution becomes the defacto standard for how all users on all platforms in all major regions purchase their games we will be stuck in this awkward transitional phase in which the price of a digital copy is determined by the costs of retail distribution.
My guess as to why Steam/publisher X doesn't enforce strict region-based copy protection is that if they did they'd be disenfranchising a fairly large portion of their userbase. I'd imagine that there are many users who don't get official versions of certain games in their region, or who prefer a specific language version rather than the one localized for their market, or who use online retailers to buy cheap Steam codes without knowing the point of origin (really, is there any point to Origin?), they probably add up to a fairly large number of users. Again, as digital becomes the preferred method of distributing games I'd hope that localizations would happen earlier and products would launch everywhere at the same time and publishers would no longer need to try to control which version is available to whom and when.
Log in to comment