a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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Related to having a more international audience: Right now, most players seem to speak English. As a native English speaker, I find this convenient. Communications in the game may become more problematic, with a wider international player base.
Other games I've played have dealt with this by automatically translating chat messages (with mixed success, but generally it works) though given the other restrictions on text in the game (e.g. number of characters) I don't see how that could be applied here.
On the other hand, different languages may simply be an interesting feature of the game, making it more reflective of the real world anyway. But it's something to consider... the difficulty that people in other countries have in buying the game does help keep the language issue at bay.
I also thought about this while considering my approach here. The problem is that there is an official translations section on this forum, dedicated for non-English players, it implies a trend for international coverage anyways. It seems that the game may be seperated into language servers one day. That would not contradict with my sentiment of regional pricing.
I'm pretty sure FastSpring, the intermediary for payments that the OHOL website is using whenever you buy the game, allows regional pricing?
But then, whatever reasons there may be for not setting up regional pricing, there's the risk that people will use a VPN or proxy to pay much less.This is a common a thing. Steam will ban you for it—it's been common for years for people to pay less than 30 USD for brand new games on EA Games' Origin service through the use of VPNs.
So one of the reasons, in addition to whatever reasons Jason personally has for not supporting regional pricing, is that he doesn't want to get screwed.
I did not know that this was a huge issue TBH. You are right in that case. Anyways smart people come up with smart solutions for scams such as these. Maybe that smart solution is just yet to be unraveled. We shall see.
You're asking the creator of the game to sell his game to you cheaper because of currency exchange rates? How is that fair for him?
You have a valid point on the surface; However, the point is that perception of the price on peoples mind is obviously subjective due to the individual's income. This causes the game to be perceived as overpriced in certain regions. These certain regions contain many hundred thousands of potential customers. A slight modification such as 20% price change may bring 100% more sales in those regions, that would increase the income of the game significantly. That would only be fair for the developer he shall earn more anyways.
This is just a crude opinion TBH and I am merely making a remark on this topic in order to stimulate a market research and analysis. Who knows, I may be horribly wrong too. Can't know until the market is actually analyzed. Or maybe, Jason already had such an analysis and he decided this is the way to go. This is his product and I cannot judge him on the pricing, just remarking a general issue in customers end.
This is a sincere notice to the Developer Mr. Rohrer, Hope it will reach its mark.
Most games are sold at separate prices for different countries in platforms such as Steam.
Especially Indie games become much more accesable to worldwide attention due to this income/price balancing.
I live in Turkey and most indie games that cost $20, cost around 30-40 TL which is equivalent to 8-10 USD.
Because this game is non-steam, everyone is stuck with $20 .
So now you might think that is not fair, why would some people get their game for much cheaper right?
Wrong actually:
The point is, how much of something you can buy in that country with taht amount of money. As a worldwide huge company, McDonalds is often accepted as a de facto price standard; as it sells same product for many different prices around the world. For that matter, with $20 you can buy approx. 4 Bigmac's in US, while you can get 8 of them in Turkey for the same $20 bill which is 80 Turkish Liras (TL). This is due to how much time you have to work to gain the same amount of money and McDonalds does know what they are doing while calculating their prices for the same affordability standard all over the globe.
This means your game costs twice as much in my country and I totally think that, like many other fellow Turkish gamers, an indie game should not cost just that much. This blocks the game from growing internationally. This issue MUST be addressed as it keeps my friends and for now me from buying the game.
Thank you and I am looking forward to see everyones comments on this.
For McDonalds Currency index: https://www.economist.com/content/big-mac-index
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Flindros
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