PaterAlf: I wouldn't mind paying a flat price with the added VAT at checkout.
I hope that if people are going to continue to complain about regional pricing, that
that is what they would explicitly ask for every time they complain.
I still wouldn't like the complaining, or even agree that game companies have
any moral responsibility to provide such "fairness". In fact, at least for public game companies, they have a moral obligation to their share holders to charge whatever prices make the most money, and that's just not going to be prices as per "flat price + taxes". But if people are going to demand "fairness", the demands would at least be less grating on my ears if they stuck with something that could at least be rationally argued as "fair". To make the message even less grating, drop the whole idea that this is a "moral position". It's not. People
want to pay the same price as the US does, so they ask for that. They have no moral right to such a price. The dev does no moral wrong by not providing such a price. It would also help if such "moral" people would stop engaging in immoral acts (such as trashing game ratings, immoral because it involves providing false information to others).
And then there's the Russia question. If the anti-regional-pricing crowd gets their way (price parity with US), do they then start complaining en masse about not getting the same price as Russia (as some already do)?
PaterAlf: But right at the moment the VAT argument only works by pure chance, because of the recent currency conversion (and yet we are paying 25% more for many games instead of 19%).
I believe the pricing of games is a
lot more complicated than many people in the anti-regional-pricing crowd like to admit (especially on their own, without prompting):
* VAT is one of the issues (but only one).
* You bring up another issue, and that is currency fluctuations - any attempt by a dev to have stable prices in a given local currency (as opposed to no price set in local currencies and only "current conversion rate from US $" pricing) involves significant currency conversion risk if they get paid in US $ (or some other currency besides they one they are selling in). They can play it safe (start with a high enough local price to absorb a good amount of that risk), and piss people off right away. Or they can put the conversion on knife's edge and then piss people off later when they have to bump the local currency price up to the next psychological number.
* There's the whole psychological number thing. From what I've read, it actually works. E.g., selling something for 19.99 just sells way more copies than selling the same thing for 20.00, much more sales difference than a .01 price difference "should" make. This leads to the dev's doing "rounding" (one could call it anti-rounding due to its preference for non-zero digits, or maybe "9-rounding"), which of course affects the price in one currency versus another.
* There's the "retailer level playing field" to consider. A retailer is generally not going to agree to carry a product at a higher price (for a given region) than another retailer, but devs want retailers to carry their games, so devs have to provide a level playing field. If what Klumpen0815 said is true, that GOG games are using the Cyprus VAT rate (presumably because legally GOG has their corporate HQ in Cyprus?), then what about other retailers that are based elsewhere and have to pay a different amount of VAT even for the same customer? If one of them needs a higher price to cover their costs, the dev may end up having to use that same price for all retailers, even if some of them are paying less VAT and could in theory charge customers less. This could get complicated fast when the dev is in one country, publisher another, retailers all over the place, and customers in the same or different countries as any of the above. In some cases there are still brick-and-mortar stores to consider. There may be "legacy pricing" in some cases - if the game has been on Steam for a while selling at a certain price, Steam isn't going to play nice anymore if the dev tries to charge less on GOG, so either GOG accepts the dev's current (Steam) prices, or GOG has to get the dev to not only use lower prices on GOG but also on Steam (and every other retailer the dev is already using).
* You bring up Russia's low pricing and point out that other countries arguably as "poor" don't get the same price break. But I believe you completely misidentify the reason the devs sell games to Russia at the low price. This is not "humanitarian aid", this is business. It's a pretty safe bet that they sell games to Russia on the cheap because they just sell so many more games that way that their total Russian profits increase despite the much lower price. That's just Econ 101.
* And that leads us to the long tradition of haggling. This is how buyer and seller used to agree on a fair price between the two of them, and that fair price could be different for every customer and it was still fair. Some people just want (value) a product more than others. Haggling these days takes a much different form - one-on-one haggling would be quite expensive (and where do they find that many skilled hagglers?), so it works differently now. Part of it works by region, part of it by time. Game companies guess at what a game is worth to customers (at least to "first wave" customers who are willing to pay a premium to get the game right away) and they put that price out there. From what I've read, for example (don't know if it's true, but just go with it as an example), point-and-clicks are really big in Germany - i.e., on a per-capita basis, more Germans are interested in such games than people in most other countries, and more Germans are willing to pay more than in most other countries. So the game company's "opening offer" (day 1 price) in Germany may be set higher than other countries, because while in other countries that price may just be too high (extremely low sales), in Germany they can get a good number of sales because enough Germans just really want the game that much. That's the region part of it. There's also the time part. How does the customer haggle, saying "no that offer is too high?" - they just don't buy. They wait. Eventually sales start. Does the first sale (say 15%) result in a low enough price? For some customers yes - they buy, for some customers no, they continue to wait. Later on the game is 30% off. Some people buy, some people wait. The haggling continues. This is how individuals get the price they personally agree with. If you have a more efficient/timely way of measuring individual customer demand, I am sure the gaming industry would love to hear it.
* Devs also have a lot of information we do not have. They have sales numbers, probably by region. They have historical data from any previous games they've sold. They may get similar data from the publisher and/or retailers. Surely they at least in some cases take this information into account when setting prices.
* There may be other factors I am not aware of (or just not thinking of at the moment). Unless you were in on all of the details of what the dev/publisher/retailers had to go through to get the game into your hands, there's just no way to know all of the factors they took into consideration when setting prices.
Even though I've said that one could make a rational argument for "same price + taxes" being at least some sort of "fair", I don't really even want that. I actually
want the devs to just charge whatever they think is best, and if regionally pricing is the best they come up with, then so be it. I am under no obligation to buy a game at any price - I can just buy when the price suits me. Everyone else has that same freedom.
I think it would be truly conceited of me to presume to know what the best price for someone else's game is, what prices they should be setting to make the most money (and improve the chances they'll still be around to make more games for me in the future). That includes presuming to know that if the price in the US is $X that the price in any another country should be $X (or $X + taxes). And I believe the same to be true of those doing the whining - they don't know either. They either don't know that they don't know, or they simply don't care that they don't know. They want the price they want, end of story. This apparent equating of "want" to "moral right" is how they earn the "self-entitled" (and other) labels.
