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Well, whether you can afford something or not doesn't have to be a matter of nationality.

This is ultimately the reason I used to pirate software as a young person.

I grew up in a poorer northern UK town. Chucking 50 quid at a PlayStation game was, let's call it "highly impractical". So me, and most of my friends, would burn CDRs and mod the consoles.

I think the correct answer to this, ultimately, if you care about having the widest audience, is charging for the product, but not putting _too much_ effort into piracy being impossible.

The middle classes will still buy your stuff because it's the polite thing.

>The middle classes will still buy your stuff because it's the polite thing.

Not only polite, but easy. If you could afford the game, you buy it, it downloads, you play. Piracy is more work, but if you value that time spent as less than the price of the product, of course you will pirate.

I used to pirate a lot of music. I'd have to find the title on some tracker, download the album for a couple hours (shit internet at the time), import it, deal with metadata, deal with album artwork, import into my device. It was a lot of work, but I couldn't afford $1 a song! I definitely can afford $10 a month though, and spend probably 2 seconds finding a track on spotify to play it on any and all devices. Worth it. Easy. Affordable. But if you charge too much, don't be surprised when your users are willing to take the long way and get your stuff for free.

Nothing will ever be uncrackable, so why waste expensive engineering salary on the digital equivalent to the war on drugs?

Okay, so in this scenario, either 1) the developer is losing money on every sale to a Thai customer, or 2) the developer is overcharging US customers. Either way, the developer does indeed seem to lack any incentive to have separate pricing for Thai customers; why take on those support costs for a fraction of the revenue when you still have Americans paying full price?

The demographics that can't afford the game (e.g. certain overseas countries, or low-income individuals even in domestic markets and otherwise-more-affluent overseas markets) will be out of luck only until the game goes on sale (whether temporarily or permanently; older games tend to be cheaper than newer games).

In other words: setting a lower pricepoint for specific countries to attract more sales in those countries is a pretty major footgun when it comes to actual revenue from those sales. Better to keep the price even across all markets, then only drop the price if you want more sales (and in smaller increments than "here's a 90% discount just because you happen to be in Thailand"). Trying to establish different prices for different locales is a premature "optimization" at its worst.

The actual reason for separated national markets was that selling to a national market once upon a time involved actually getting a physical good (e.g. a cartridge or optical disc) to a customer in a different nation; for most game developers, it's easier to go through a distributor for that particular market than to try to tackle all the logistics themselves. Nowadays there's no physical good being exchanged, so there's really no point to dealing with that kind of market segregation.

Books and cartridge games had regional pricing simply because it optimized profits. It isn't a moral question.

It's a pretty clumsy system because it's putting a physical constraint on a digital product that's otherwise possible to get everywhere on earth, provided some asshole in a boardroom doesn't throw a fit (which is evidently what happened when region locking games became common). It's a physical constraint that doesn't even work as intended, in fact it probably harms the brand and the product more than anything.

Not everyone in Thailand is broke. There might be a lot more broke people in Thailand than in the U.S., and on average the sprawling land area of Thailand has less wealth than the land area of the U.S., but I bet there are a lot of people in the U.S. who, like their Thai working class counterparts, also can't afford a $60 game. Now the working class of Thailand gets a game that's right in their price bracket while the working class of the U.S. does not.

Averaging an entire countries wealth to set a price worked pretty nice for the people of Thailand in this example, but obviously burnt the poor in the U.S. pretty bad. If your goal is to get your game into the hands of the most customers, consider offering 'regional' pricing for all the homeless in central park who might live within a couple dozen feet of the most expensive apartments in the world. It turns out regional pricing kinda sucks because wealth isn't distributed evenly across any region.

The economy is global, not regional, there are rich and poor people everywhere in differing and ever changing proportions independent of how borders might be drawn on the map. If you want to make it affordable to an economic bracket, go ahead and lower your price or offer low income credit or something, don't make it so you can't buy your digital game while connected to the internet in an arbitrary country.

>The game is supposed to be affordable!

I think this is the fundamental point where you'll win or lose people.

If it's a game made for fun without income being a goal: yea, totally. And many of these are free for that reason, or "sold" on name-your-price platforms.

If the game was made to make money: hell no. Games are not supposed to be affordable. Games are supposed to be profitable to the creator, the price is set to optimize that. If regional pricing cuts into it (i.e. due to resales) more than it makes, it should not be done. "Access to game X" is not in any way a right or necessity, there's no obligation to make it available everywhere.

Well, maybe just price the game 5$ for everyone and let ALL poor people pirate it as they please...

I think that's called rent-seeking.

It's nigh impossible for a video game to be rent-seeking, since games are completely optional and often worse to play than not play. Only the few games that infect a whole culture can be thought of as needs subject to rent-seeking due to social pressures.

It's call market segmentation.

A seller want to sell their good to every buyer at exactly the highest price that buyer is willing to pay. The seller can't do that if they give everyone the same price so they look for ways to segment the buyers into groups which have similar valuations and charge each group a different price.

If you pay attention, most pricing schemes are about market segmentation. Region locked items is obviously one. Most digital goods are sold at prices that decrease over time: it's basically segmenting the market by time. Buyers with high valuations buy first, those with lower valuations buy later, etc.