Sales Data No More Robots' founder on manipulating eShop sales

[Deleted member 101]

Nintendo increases South African eShop prices by 24%

The SA eShop used to be a place where Europeans in particular were able to buy Nintendo 1st party games for 10 to 15 euros off. Well, until Nintendo "fixed" the prices.

You can find a lot of news like this, especially on Steam. It happens all the time.

The simple truth is that sales in 3rd world or developing countries are merely a "nice to have" for the multimillion dollar companies. They can offer their games for cheaper in those countries solely because their actual investment gets recouped in first world countries at first world pricing. If too many people abuse this system it falls apart and publishers will increase their regional pricing in a heartbeat to secure their investment. "Just make games cheaper everywhere" is not an argument, it's simply not feasible.

So, yeah, you can abuse regional pricing to save a couple bucks. That's up to you, no one is stopping you. But don't portray it as some kind of anti-capitalist act of sticking it to the man. The man doesn't care, the victims are solely the people who are largely struggling to afford new games to begin with.

I'm not really liking having words put into my mouth. I said that it's not a good look to shame on consumers.

I agree that the man doesn't care, but I also don't put blame on single consumers for buying a game for a lower price. As long as systems like this exist people will try to find (loop)holes.

Consumer shaming has never worked and it has never done good for any market ever.

 

[PixelKnight]

Please note that terminology such as “third world/first world” and “developing/developed country” is outdated and offensive, and is strongly discouraged in this thread. Be specific about the country/countries you are talking about.
-PixelKnight, Irene, Paranoodle

 

[paranoodle]

I think the only way to 'stop' stuff like this is to make it harder to change countries. That doesn't mean region locking games themselves or consoles. Instead they could make it so that it's not possible to have accounts from multiple regions on one console or something. Just spitballing here but there are other solutions than to blame consumers.

Honestly it's just a situation that's really hard to find good solutions for (if any even exist), because it's really easy to make life way harder for the people who need the regional pricing, or those who don't use loopholes, kind of like how it ends up going with DRM where it frequently causes more annoyance for legitimate buyers than for pirates.

Some places make it harder to change your region, which ends up causing issues for people who move and/or travel long-term. For example, I've had to remake an entirely new EGS account because for some reason one day it mistakenly changed my country to South Korea (I have never been to South Korea in my life) and when I contacted support, was told that certain regions you can change to but not from, and that I was shit out of luck, even if it wasn't my fault.

And if you make it hard to change regions, some people will just decide to inaccurately set their region as a cheaper one permanently instead. Which you can try to prevent via IP (fucks over anyone traveling again, can be spoofed with varying levels of difficulty) or requiring "real" identification like SSN (privacy nightmare, fucks over non-citizens/non-permanent residents).

It's definitely the fault of corporations when their reaction to loophole use is to punish the people who play fair (on either side of the equation), because they'll always prioritize their bottom line before anything else, but I can't fault people in countries with lower purchasing power for getting frustrated when those prices are raised as a result of regional pricing abuse.

 

[Pennington]

Honest questions: 1. what's the reason in the first place why Nintendo allows regional changes?
I think a better way would be to tie the shop region to the physical location of the Switch console. Surely this is achievable?

 

[meatbag]

Please note that terminology such as “third world/first world” and “developing/developed country” is outdated and offensive, and is strongly discouraged in this thread. Be specific about the country/countries you are talking about.
-PixelKnight, Irene, Paranoodle

Okay, this is honestly my first time hearing about this. In particular the “developing/developed” descriptors for countries are commonly accepted terms in the medical field. Interesting to note.

 

[PixelKnight]

Okay, this is honestly my first time hearing about this. In particular the “developing/developed” descriptors for countries are commonly accepted terms in the medical field. Interesting to note.

Yeah, I’d say ‘first/third world’ is worse but ‘developing’ is still both in common media use while also criticised/debated in some circles for the whole ‘othering’ aspect of it- some notes here-

Developing country - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

Generally, it’s usually better to just be specific, or at least, that was the conclusion of the mod team discussion on it! Personally, if I needed to use a group term, something less loaded and more specific like ‘high/middle/low income countries’ gets used in various international contexts too, particularly economically.

 

[taptaps]

I'm not really liking having words put into my mouth. I said that it's not a good look to shame on consumers.

I agree that the man doesn't care, but I also don't put blame on single consumers for buying a game for a lower price. As long as systems like this exist people will try to find (loop)holes.

Consumer shaming has never worked and it has never done good for any market ever.

It's not "shaming" to tell people that their actions have consequences on others.

 

[Jersh]

this is a joke, right?
wtf...

anyway, Nintendo games in Brazil costs over 30% of the minimum wage.
Switch OLED 2 times the minium wage.

I was confused as first - but a Google shows me the Brazilian minimum wage is monthly, yeah? I'm used to it being expressed as an hourly wage in the US.

A game costing over a week of work is nuts.

It's bad for people to abuse lower prices in poorer countries, and this developer is just describing the ways they benefit from it.

Is it bad in this case?

The only downside I'm aware of is pricing getting raised by the publisher to stop the abuse from happening. But if the developer is legit benefiting from it, then they have little reason to raise the price, and everyone's happy - including people in the region whose pricing is abused.

Of course, if the end game of this is developers only lowering regional pricing for a few weeks, that's not good. But as this developer pointed out, the problem solved itself.

 

[paranoodle]

Honest questions: 1. what's the reason in the first place why Nintendo allows regional changes?
I think a better way would be to tie the shop region to the physical location of the Switch console. Surely this is achievable?

How would you tie it to location, though? Especially for a portable console that people are likely to take with them when they travel?

If you tie it to where the console currently is (which is fairly easy to fake, but let's pretend we find a way that always works), then that means people might not be able to purchase any games when they're not in their home country, because the Switch eShop requires using a credit card for that country, and as far as I know not all countries offer eShop cards (and if they do, you still need to find a shop to buy some). So essentially no buying games outside your home country.

If you tie it to where the console was bought/set up/etc, then does that mean you can't sell (or resell) switches across country lines without running into logistics issues? What happens if you permanently move to another country?

Also at the moment, countries/regions are set up on a per-account basis and not a per-console basis, so would this mean you're not allowed to connect to any accounts on a Switch that don't match the Switch region?

And if you allow changing regions but in a more supervised/limited way (to make sure people only change for the "right" reasons but ensure they can change for those reasons), then you need to have employees to take care of vetting which changes are or aren't allowed, and that costs money too, so it's frequently not an option companies want to go for.

It's just kind of a whack-a-mole situation of trying to patch loopholes, but any time you patch one people just figure something else out, and you've inconvenienced a bunch of customers who hadn't used the loopholes at all. Which I think is part of the reason region-locking is more of a digital-only worry now as opposed to how it used to be also physical (remember the issues with the region locking on the 3DS?)

 

[ermitron2]

Honestly it's just a situation that's really hard to find good solutions for (if any even exist), because it's really easy to make life way harder for the people who need the regional pricing, or those who don't use loopholes, kind of like how it ends up going with DRM where it frequently causes more annoyance for legitimate buyers than for pirates.

Some places make it harder to change your region, which ends up causing issues for people who move and/or travel long-term. For example, I've had to remake an entirely new EGS account because for some reason one day it mistakenly changed my country to South Korea (I have never been to South Korea in my life) and when I contacted support, was told that certain regions you can change to but not from, and that I was shit out of luck, even if it wasn't my fault.

And if you make it hard to change regions, some people will just decide to inaccurately set their region as a cheaper one permanently instead. Which you can try to prevent via IP (fucks over anyone traveling again, can be spoofed with varying levels of difficulty) or requiring "real" identification like SSN (privacy nightmare, fucks over non-citizens/non-permanent residents).

It's definitely the fault of corporations when their reaction to loophole use is to punish the people who play fair (on either side of the equation), because they'll always prioritize their bottom line before anything else, but I can't fault people in countries with lower purchasing power for getting frustrated when those prices are raised as a result of regional pricing abuse.

Its is a complex problem that is going to need a complex solution, but in the meantime at least we should have some understanding when you know you are affecting people living in these countries. As other post mentioned, iit already happened in 3Ds store, then SA store was affected and peopel jumped to the mexican. Then the mexican was affected and they jumped to the Canadian store, and then the publishers doubling down on this in steam and finally Sony saying "screw it , no regional prices for anyone, you buy in USD and I don't care". So it becomes harder to enjoy this hobby as we are getting less options and then we get comments like "hey, cheap is cheap even if we affect others"

I think a better way would be to tie the shop region to the physical location of the Switch console. Surely this is achievable?

IIRC this is how it worked in the 3ds before they unified the accounts and it was a problem if you lost it or changed country. Switch being a mobile device makes sense to not have to tie it to the console if anything happens

 

[Deleted member 2]

Is it bad in this case?

One case doesn't invalidate the point

Also I'm not going to debate or argue this - this just isn't the forum or community I care to do that with. I'd rather just state my opinion and move on.

 

[jnWake]

Okay, this is honestly my first time hearing about this. In particular the “developing/developed” descriptors for countries are commonly accepted terms in the medical field. Interesting to note.

From what I could gather (as someone from a "developing" country myself), the term itself has received some debate regarding how accurate it is, but I found very little indications of it actually being an offensive term, since it's mostly rooted on economic indicators.

 

[Jersh]

One case doesn't invalidate the point

Also I'm not going to debate or argue this - this just isn't the forum or community I care to do that with. I'd rather just state my opinion and move on.

Yeah, and my post was made forgetting that, like, not every game is going to blow up the chart just because people are abusing the system to pay less. Obviously there's still problems here, which is why the dev is still calling on platform holders to fix it.

 

[meatbag]

A game costing over a week of work is nuts.

That’s just the reality for some countries.

Is it bad in this case?

In this case, I’d say no! The dev was worried at first but it all worked out. But there are also probably cases where it doesn’t work out.

From what I could gather (as someone from a "developing" country myself), the term itself has received some debate regarding how accurate it is, but I found very little indications of it actually being an offensive term, since it's mostly rooted on economic indicators.

That’s what I thought. Thanks for the info.

 

[jnWake]

A game costing over a week of work is nuts.

What if I told you the PS5's price where I live is double the monthly minimum wage and also a fair bit above the monthly salary of over 50% of the population.

 

[Jersh]

What if I told you the PS5's price where I live is double the monthly minimum wage and also a fair bit above the monthly salary of over 50% of the population.

Even scalped prices in the US weren't that bad - and that's using the national minimum wage, which many states raise further.

But I believe it. The economics aren't there to bring down the price for these types of things. Regional digital pricing should provide relief; hopefully platform holders find a way to do a better job of making sure of that. (Not that that helps with an actual PS5, but still.)

 

[paranoodle]

Its is a complex problem that is going to need a complex solution, but in the meantime at least we should have some understanding when you know you are affecting people living in these countries. As other post mentioned, iit already happened in 3Ds store, then SA store was affected and peopel jumped to the mexican. Then the mexican was affected and they jumped to the Canadian store, and then the publishers doubling down on this in steam and finally Sony saying "screw it , no regional prices for anyone, you buy in USD and I don't care". So it becomes harder to enjoy this hobby as we are getting less options and then we get comments like "hey, cheap is cheap even if we affect others"

Yeah I absolutely agree with this, it might be on corporations for actually implementing the changes that hurt regional pricing, but that doesn't mean I want to participate in behavior that could make it worse. I'm sorry it's made the hobby worse for you, it's a really unfair situation.

I'm on the other side of regional pricing (prices get marked up for my country) so I'm lucky I don't have personal experience with being priced out due to my store closing, but even then the tightening of region restrictions has made digital purchases way worse. Everybody ends up getting punished for the behavior of the few, even if the punishments greatly vary in severity.

 

[ermitron2]

Yeah I absolutely agree with this, it might be on corporations for actually implementing the changes that hurt regional pricing, but that doesn't mean I want to participate in behavior that could make it worse. I'm sorry it's made the hobby worse for you, it's a really unfair situation.

I'm on the other side of regional pricing (prices get marked up for my country) so I'm lucky I don't have personal experience with being priced out due to my store closing, but even then the tightening of region restrictions has made digital purchases way worse. Everybody ends up getting punished for the behavior of the few, even if the punishments greatly vary in severity.

We manage to get around this, but yeah since 2020 I've seen more publishers just doing a direct conversion from USD to MX instead of a regional price. This creates an interesting situation where it's actually cheaper to import a game with full retail price from the US than buying it here

 

[undefined]

They're claiming they climbed the US charts by doing well on Argentina, I wonder how that actually works

I just double checked and the charts are different in different eShops in the same region. Maybe they ended up going viral indirectly, or the eShop assign some kind of weight to other eShops' sales or maybe the US one is just special and aggregates everything

About the region exploit, dunno what to do besides some kind of partial region locking, dunno how that would be, maybe allow only local payment methods depending on the exchange rate. I say partial because newer eShops have less games so it would be bad to fully lock people out, I used to buy stuff not available on my local eShop

 

[Deleted member 1005]

I'm not gonna lie and say that I think this is awful and people shouldn't do it. Nintendo has left this loophole open for such a long time now, i'm not going to blame anyone for wanting to save a few bucks. Does it suck for the people living in those countries, maybe, but as someone that browses the mexican eshop quite a bit, the games from the big publishers (except for sega funnily enough) have always priced their games around US value anyway, and there are still a whole bunch of small games like this one that continue to match their prices with the region's value.

In the end, this most likely leads to a bunch of lesser sales of a game these people weren't going to pay full price for anyway. Maybe they'll play it, love it, and buy their next game from their own region at full price, or double dip on another platform.

 

[Guaraná]

I was confused as first - but a Google shows me the Brazilian minimum wage is monthly, yeah? I'm used to it being expressed as an hourly wage in the US.

A game costing over a week of work is nuts.

oh, sorry
yeah, that's monthly.

I mean, there are some things that are much cheaper in Brazil, compared to Japan, Europe, and the USA like housing and food. I lived a couple of years in Firenze, NY and Lisbon and omg... every trip to the supermarket I would go bankrupt a little, don't even wanna get started on renting prices...

But electronics (any sort), and cars (transportation in general) are absurdly expensive here, not only because of taxes.

 

[em]

The Argentine eShop used to offer codes that could be claimed on US accounts (instead of being tied to the Argentine account that was used to purchase the game). I think Nintendo closed that loophole.

A game costing over a week of work is nuts.

To be clear, there are lots of Brazilians (and Indians, Russians, and Chinese, etc.) that can afford games. The minimum wage is a far cry from what professionals, let alone capitalists/business owners/land owners, have as income. People who are surviving off the minimum or even median wage in these places aren't the market for modern game consoles.