26 Oct 2024 - Thanks to a few tweaks to the back-end infrastructure, the server save will now last 10 minutes at most, rather than way over 20 as it did before.
Check full changelog...
Unfairness and Discontent: Global players may perceive regionalized pricing as unfair, especially if they're paying more than players from less affluent regions for the same content. This could lead to feelings of resentment and community divisions.
Players from other countries doesn't even need to "know" / "be aware" it is a different price for other people. This argument is not strong. Also, even if they are aware, I doubt people would be mad we are just making prices fair to other people. The concept of cheap/expensive depends on how many hours you have to work to obtain said product. People in poor regions of Africa have to work for days to afford some food, would you get mad if it was "cheaper" for them. Just a poor example but you get what I mean.
Complexity and Administration: Implementing and maintaining a regional pricing system can be complex and resource-intensive. It requires constant monitoring of economic conditions and currency exchange rates, which might divert resources from other important aspects of game development.
This is the strongest argument, for sure it is a lot of work. However you could implement it to only some regions, picking the most popular regions that plays Tibiantis.
Revenue Inconsistency: Regionalized pricing can result in revenue inconsistencies, as the income from different regions might not be proportional to player engagement or resource allocation. This could affect the developer's ability to reinvest in the game's growth and improvement.
This is easy to track if they do a per region test of regional pricing, just check after some time how revenues went from that region group.
Player Base Fragmentation: Drastically different pricing across regions could lead players to choose servers based on pricing rather than gameplay preferences, potentially causing population imbalances on servers and negatively impacting gameplay experiences.
This argument is completely invalid as we only have one server, doesn't make any sense.
Negative Impact on Brand Image: If not executed carefully, regionalized pricing might unintentionally project a perception of the game being of lower quality in regions with lower prices. This could harm the game's overall brand image and affect potential player acquisition in other markets.
This also doesn't make any sense as we all play the same game , same server.
Player Level: 20 Profession: Master Sorcerer Residence: Kazordoon
Posts: 9
Re: Regionalized pricing (premium is too expensive for some peop
Hi! I could go for very long why this is a bad idea (economically and socially) but dude, what are you even talking about.
Median salary in Brazil is around 1500 USD while Polish median salary is around 1200 USD. If anything, Polish people should be having a lower PACC price than Brazilian ;). If you want to compare how people live, don't compare the minimum wage (as this is state orchestrated value, not really a meaningful image of how people live somewhere). There are many other metrics that provide a better comparison. However none are definite and it's a much bigger social study to compare different countries.
However your sentiment about making pricing fair is noble but honestly world is not a fair place. Let's say that people on average really earn much less somewhere - they still have to pay the same price for iphone or other imported goods. Why should a very small company from Poland invest a lot of money to try to make their service fair for other countries? Should they make Swedes pay 3x more for PACC because they earn much more money?
Also consider one more thing. PACC can be used to trade it for in game item that can make you money (sell pig for XX gold). What will happen if you introduce regionalized pricing (I guarantee it) at first people from "poorer" countries will just invest money to buy a lot of cheap pigs, sell it for gold in game, and then go to the regular "black" markets (facebook?) and sell the money for real money back. This will inflate the value of pigs in game tremendously making them super cheap quickly (like 10k would be my guess) which makes it not worth it to buy for anyone from "richer" countries (if they wanted to sell for gold). This will in consequence make the company lose a lot of money because most of the pigs are bought in the countries that pay less for it and most of the people form "richer" countries would probably just buy PACC for themselves or even just buy gold for real cash from those who have lower prices and just buy pigs for PACC online.
And also... you say people would not have to know. Lol. People know such stuff pretty instantly. People are smarter than you think and if it's possible to cheat the system, they will. Like just ask a Brazilian friend to buy you tons of pigs even if you are from Poland. It's not hard to transfer money to Brazil from Poland , you know?
Hi! I could go for very long why this is a bad idea (economically and socially) but dude, what are you even talking about.
Median salary in Brazil is around 1500 USD while Polish median salary is around 1200 USD. If anything, Polish people should be having a lower PACC price than Brazilian ;). If you want to compare how people live, don't compare the minimum wage (as this is state orchestrated value, not really a meaningful image of how people live somewhere). There are many other metrics that provide a better comparison. However none are definite and it's a much bigger social study to compare different countries.
im not in favor neither against the proposal of the topic owner BUT "what are you even talking about?" i did not even read all your post since the first statements were VERY FAR from reality, brazil minimum salary in U$D is 271,92 (and i gotta say more than 35% of brazil population survives with one minimum salary) ah, and if u wanna talk about "median salary" in brazil its 510,88 U$D (2021 data). u just cant compare europe to latin america, when it comes to income. bye <3
Player Level: 20 Profession: Master Sorcerer Residence: Kazordoon
Posts: 9
Re: Regionalized pricing (premium is too expensive for some peop
I'm sorry if I made any mistakes in the amounts, but I based it off what quick google search said. But honestly you missed a point I was trying to make, one single metric doesn't say a lot about the situation in the country (like minimal wage, median, average, whatever). Can you show me any source for the median metrics you are talking about? Everything I found about median in Brazil says around 1500$ - which by its own is probably bullshit (and that's correct and that's my point), as as I mentioned it doesn't say much about a situation in a country.
Hi! I could go for very long why this is a bad idea (economically and socially) but dude, what are you even talking about.
Median salary in Brazil is around 1500 USD while Polish median salary is around 1200 USD. If anything, Polish people should be having a lower PACC price than Brazilian ;). If you want to compare how people live, don't compare the minimum wage (as this is state orchestrated value, not really a meaningful image of how people live somewhere). There are many other metrics that provide a better comparison. However none are definite and it's a much bigger social study to compare different countries.
However your sentiment about making pricing fair is noble but honestly world is not a fair place. Let's say that people on average really earn much less somewhere - they still have to pay the same price for iphone or other imported goods. Why should a very small company from Poland invest a lot of money to try to make their service fair for other countries? Should they make Swedes pay 3x more for PACC because they earn much more money?
Also consider one more thing. PACC can be used to trade it for in game item that can make you money (sell pig for XX gold). What will happen if you introduce regionalized pricing (I guarantee it) at first people from "poorer" countries will just invest money to buy a lot of cheap pigs, sell it for gold in game, and then go to the regular "black" markets (facebook?) and sell the money for real money back. This will inflate the value of pigs in game tremendously making them super cheap quickly (like 10k would be my guess) which makes it not worth it to buy for anyone from "richer" countries (if they wanted to sell for gold). This will in consequence make the company lose a lot of money because most of the pigs are bought in the countries that pay less for it and most of the people form "richer" countries would probably just buy PACC for themselves or even just buy gold for real cash from those who have lower prices and just buy pigs for PACC online.
And also... you say people would not have to know. Lol. People know such stuff pretty instantly. People are smarter than you think and if it's possible to cheat the system, they will. Like just ask a Brazilian friend to buy you tons of pigs even if you are from Poland. It's not hard to transfer money to Brazil from Poland , you know?
First, as our friend pointed out your data on Brazil's salary/wage is completely wrong, I can guarantee you only a very small portion of the population earns 1500 USD or more. In fact theres data that about 90% of the population earns less than 719,53 dollars (converting). [source: https://economia.uol.com.br/noticias/bbc/2021/12/13/calculadora-de-renda-90-brasileiros-ganham-menos-de-r-35-mil-confira-sua-posicao-lista.htm]
Second, I am not asking for a extremely reduced price, I am asking for a very small discount that would be significant enough to brazilians but would barely be enough for europeans to go through all the risky process + conversion rates + taxes to buy from a black market.
Example: Today we'd spend about R$ 54 (brazil currency) to buy premium and for europeans its 9,5 euro. We actually pay a bit more than 9,5 euro because if you add all the taxes / conversion rates on top of the direct currency conversion we end up paying like 10 or 10,5 euro
If they had a cheaper option for brazilians where premium would be close to R$40 - which in direct conversion to euro is about 7,5 euro, it would hardly be worth for Polish or Europeans to purchase from brazilians as they would have to deal with all the same conversion rates / taxes which would end up meaning 8,5 euro. Do you really think we would have such major consequences if premium was only 1 euro cheaper for brazilians? I bet the polish guy would prefer to buy from Tibiantis website which is a reliable source than going through all that black market process and exchange rates and taxes only to save 1 euro at the end of the day.
Also, its quite simple for Tibiantis staff to implement a way to pruchase only the premium time direct tied to account (like it normally is) and leave that as the only option with regional pricing. Then you could still have same price for premium pig if that is considered a risk.
Its hard to argue anything other than the work required for this, which I understand and is likely why they won't do this. But if they see a major increase in the BRs populations (as we are a big part of the tibia niche you all know that), specially if we have a new US based server, I think they should start considering this. Premium being more expensive here than in Cipsoft's Tibia is a bit shocking for some.
I got the same reaction from almost all friends that started playing this, even if they aren't poor, its a cultural/psychological effect of "feeling" expensive so they end up double thinking on buying premium. If it was slightly cheaper they wouldn't have that feeling and likely would more easily convert to buying premium + playing more frequently.
Player Level: 20 Profession: Master Sorcerer Residence: Kazordoon
Posts: 9
Re: Regionalized pricing (premium is too expensive for some peop
I'm sorry then for the incorrect assumption after checking a lot of google sources. I'm not sure why they are so incorrect on the matter, but that's besides the point.
So in your first post you said and I quote "I am sure if it was closer to the 1,2% range like Polish price" and this implicitly suggests that you wanted the price to be around 3 times lower than what it currently is for Brazilians so around 3-4 EUR. Now you are talking about making it 1 EUR lower, these two are completely different cases.
1. 3-4 EUR So let's assume that your assumption is correct and the revenue for the company doesn't change drastically because of the change and PACC is tied to account (you cannot buy Pigs for the lowered price). This still has a huge impact on the company, as let's assume the BR population increases a lot, it affects the whole server, we start seeing queues, there is a lot more support tickets to handle, more maintenance on the server required etc. The company is based in EU and they pay EU wages for their employees so this would mean they would have to hire someone new to handle the increased traffic, pay more for the server maintenance (in EU prices). So no, maybe the revenue would stay the same or even increase if you see a big increase in BR players, but it still loses the company money. In short - you want a service paid fairly in Brazil, using Brazilian currency - set up your own company and start it in Brazil. You can make EU folks pay more for playing there for sure, but I guarantee you that you will see almost no EU population on such a server.
2. Discount from 10 EU to 9 EU (gross?) Same case but we only reduce the price slightly. This doesn't change much, people who can't afford 10 EUR for PACC will still consider 9 EUR a lot and probably you will see only a handful more people paying. But introducing a regionalized pricing will be a huge effort, especially for such a small company (I'm just guessing, but they are probably only like 3-4 employees). You need to implement the verification, you need to introduce new types of bans for people trying to cheat the system, you need to monitor this. You need to also probably consider prices for most of the world, not just Brazil because we don't want to discriminate right? Even just introducing a new payment processor is a lot of work for a small team, not even considering adding regionalization. This would also probably make it necessary for them to hire a new person, but without seeing a big increase in revenue it completely doesn't add up.
So I rest my case. If these arguments are not enough then I will not be able to convince you, but hopefully other people who read this will at least reconsider.
Just to repeat myself though - I really consider such ideas to make pricing more fair a very noble initiative. However unfortunately world is run on money and even if you think this is unfair to you then you still need to remember the company is run in EU and it's based on EU reality and the pricing is set to fit the EU reality, not the global situation and to appease everyone. It's basically better than there are less people from Brazil than that the whole server dies down. It's unfair, but it's not anyone's from Tibiantis fault.
As you know, we have many brazilians playing this game (not as many as europeans or polish but still theres lots of BRs), like myself. I got really interested in this game, and thought on buying premium account, only to find out it is extremeluy expensive for us, because there is no regionalized pricing. Let me show you:
According to website, 1x premium is 9.5 Euro or 43 PLN. Minimal wage in Poland is 3.600 PLN (about 806 euro), so this means premium cost for polish people is about 1,2% of their minimal wage.
Brazil's minimal wage is 1.320 Reais (about 250 euro), so this means for BRs, premium costs 3,8% of the minimal wage. So premium is 3x more expensive for us than for PLs.
I have some friends that started playing here but they refrained from buying premium because it felt too expensive. I am sure if it was closer to the 1,2% range like Polish price, they would surely have bought it. This means with this price you are losing sales from BRs.
Regionalized Price is a VERY COMMON pricing strategy among all type of business, I am not suggesting anything extraordinary here, but a mere conventional method of pricing so people can afford it and you'll end up selling more premium accounts.
God Level: 26 Profession: Elder Druid Residence: Ab'Dendriel
Posts: 246
Re: Regionalized pricing (premium is too expensive for some peop
We understand that the cost of premium may be significant for some players. This is exactly the reason why we eventually decided to allow selling premium to other players as an item. Because at some point before the server's start, we considered making it "buy premium for my own account" only - with no premium item and no way to transfer premium between accounts. But then we realized that some players could be unable to afford it at all.
The current in-game price of a premium piggy bank seems to be about 20-25k, which should be easily affordable for any player. That being said, we do not think that additional measurements are needed. Also, because the market is free and transferring premium between accounts (via the premium piggy bank) is not limited in any way, lowering the price just for a certain country would most likely result in people from other countries asking their friends to buy it for them etc.
And last, but not least, please mind that we are a small company. You cannot compare Tibiantis to some huge corporations. We do not have an extensive marketing and market research department, like they have. As already shown here, measuring it and optimizing the prices - based on the general wealth of the society in a certain country - is not really that easy. We do not have resources and time to dig that deep into that. Our time is limited and therefore we rather focus on the game development instead. We set the prices at the level we thought was fair, and for over 3 years we have not raised them by a penny, despite the increase of taxes and inflation.
Thank you for your suggestion, but again, as long as the premium piggy bank goes so cheap for in-game money, we do not think there is really a problem with premium availability for anyone.
We understand that the cost of premium may be significant for some players. This is exactly the reason why we eventually decided to allow selling premium to other players as an item. Because at some point before the server's start, we considered making it "buy premium for my own account" only - with no premium item and no way to transfer premium between accounts. But then we realized that some players could be unable to afford it at all.
The current in-game price of a premium piggy bank seems to be about 20-25k, which should be easily affordable for any player. That being said, we do not think that additional measurements are needed. Also, because the market is free and transferring premium between accounts (via the premium piggy bank) is not limited in any way, lowering the price just for a certain country would most likely result in people from other countries asking their friends to buy it for them etc.
And last, but not least, please mind that we are a small company. You cannot compare Tibiantis to some huge corporations. We do not have an extensive marketing and market research department, like they have. As already shown here, measuring it and optimizing the prices - based on the general wealth of the society in a certain country - is not really that easy. We do not have resources and time to dig that deep into that. Our time is limited and therefore we rather focus on the game development instead. We set the prices at the level we thought was fair, and for over 3 years we have not raised them by a penny, despite the increase of taxes and inflation.
Thank you for your suggestion, but again, as long as the premium piggy bank goes so cheap for in-game money, we do not think there is really a problem with premium availability for anyone.
Hey Kay, although you declined my proposal, I feel as a big win the fact you guys reserved time to think through this and carefully answer (and I can see you do that for every proposal, which I really admire), so thank you.
I know you are not doing this (regional pricing), but let me present some arguments:
- Regional pricing could only apply for premium time that is directly tied to the account. This way the premium piggy could keep the same price so we don't affect pigs economy.
- You say its fine that premium is expensive for some people because piggy is cheap in-game. Yes, sure, but the point of the proposal is for people that DO NOT want to use their precious in-game time in exchange for a premium, but would rather pay real cash for it. You argue it is cheap, but lets do some math here: assuming I am a new player, I'd say the best/easiest/quickest way for me to farm gold in-game would be by selling runes, specifically UHs which have better gold/mana ratio, so I will use that as a reference. Lets suppose a scenario where I only have 2 to 4 hours to play the game in a day. If I am not promoted, I could make on average one BP of UH a day, using almost 100% of my playtime with rune making. With a BP of UH being 2,5k today, it means it would take me 10 days to farm 25k for the premmy pig. This means I need to invest 1/3 of all the in-game time I can spend, only to be able to keep being premium. If you count the fact that I would also need gold for other in-game activities (promotion, upgrading gear, runes, etc), I would be left with very little time to actually enjoy the game in fact, by leveling up, and etc.
Looking at that scenario, premium piggy doesn't feel as cheap as you made it sound like. I really don't want to invest 1/3 of all the time I have available to pay only to ... be able to play properly (being premium) ... [EDIT] Moreover, that math is considering I play literally every day of the 30 days, whereas we know its quite common that I could have days that I can't or just won't play for any reason (weekends, travelling, anything). So if it means on average it would be more than 1/3, possibly almost half of the time.
- Sure, you guys are a small company, I don't expect a market research department, but you can sure work in small steps toward a bigger goal, you guys are growing and it doesn't hurt to have a plan for the future, as long as you agree it is the strategy you want to follow as a company (providing regional pricing).
