To Fight Currency Mismatches, Steam Adding Region Locking to PC Games 160
will_die writes Because of recent currency devaluation Steam has now added region locking for games sold in Russia and CIS. Brazil and local area and Indonesia and local area are also being locked. If you purchase a game from one of those regions you cannot gift it to somone outside of the area. So someone from Russia can gift a game to someone to Georgia [Note: This Georgia, rather than this one, that is.] but not to someone in the USA. You want to see the prices in the Russia store and compare them to the Steam Christmas Sale which should be starting in a few hours.
Why Steam? Why? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why Steam? Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
Didn't the rouble lose like a million percent of its value against the dollar in a day or something? They don't want you to take advantage of that, but they also don't want to alienate the Russians by raising their prices to compensate for the currency crash. I guess the middle ground should be: if you buy from the US store you can use it everywhere. If you buy from the Russian store you're stuck in Russia until you purchase the worldwide upgrade.
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Didn't the rouble lose like a million percent of its value...but they also don't want to alienate the Russians by raising their prices to compensate for the currency crash
Economically speaking, this would mean that valve is selling games at 1 millionth of the usual price, but still profiting off them. Profiting so much, that they are willing to make custom software changes rather than just change the price. That's surprising math to me. Sometimes I wonder why companies, especially companies selling digital goods, don't just set the price in one particular currency then let it somewhat auto-fluctuate in the other currencies according to the market. Wouldn't that be simple
Re:Why Steam? Why? (Score:5, Informative)
Politically speaking, Russia's currency lost value because they invaded a nearby nation and they are under sanctions.
That was more like the catalyst. The real blow came from the ~50% decline in oil prices since the beginning of the year. The Russian economy is 40%+ oil and gas and their export economy is almost entirely based on exports of same. The decline in oil prices did far more damage than sanctions or political talk alone could ever hope to.
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Usual reasons:
1. The cost of the raw oil is actually a small component of the cost of getting refined fuel into your tank. There's shipping, refining, distributer, retail, and tax expenses to consider.
2. There's a lag period.
3. Despite this gasoline prices have dropped enough that it's been on the national news multiple times.
Re: Why Steam? Why? (Score:2)
why hasn't my fuel price done the same? (Score:3)
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Sometimes I wonder why companies, especially companies selling digital goods, don't just set the price in one particular currency then let it somewhat auto-fluctuate in the other currencies according to the market. Wouldn't that be simpler for them?
Sorry, that's illegal in many countries with fucked currencies.
Most seller of luxury goods in Russia aren't selling at all. The ruble is toilet paper now, and you can't legally sell in dollars (though there's a very long tradition of doing so anyhow). You'll get 2x as many rubles for a dollar on the street as the official exchange rate, as people with limited access to the international market are paying a premium to GTFO. The only other choice Steam has is to stop selling to Russia at all.
Google's marke
Re:Why Steam? Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Had this happened 5 years ago, it's likely ISIS wouldn't have happened, but sadly they can survive now without Iranian funding.
Oh, dear, you were doing so well with your amateur economics lesson, then you stray into international affairs and fuck up bad.
Iran has never funded, and could never conceivably fund, ISIS.
ISIS is a bunch of Sunni islamic loons. Iran is a bunch of Shia islamic loons. ISIS kill Shia more or less on sight.
Iran is an ally of ISIS's enemies, Iraq and Syria. Iran is currently bombing ISIS.
If ISIS received outside funding it came from the Gulf, possibly including Saudi Arabia.
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Economically speaking, this would mean that valve is selling games at 1 millionth of the usual price, but still profiting off them. Profiting so much, that they are willing to make custom software changes rather than just change the price.
The GP was exaggerating, It's actually lost about half it's value [xe.com]. Also steam already has code to enforce region locking on games sold through other channels and already has code to set different prices for different countries. So I would assume this was a fairly minor tweak from a technical perspective.
Sometimes I wonder why companies, especially companies selling digital goods, don't just set the price in one particular currency then let it somewhat auto-fluctuate in the other currencies according to the market. Wouldn't that be simpler for them?
Simpler? yes, more profitable? no.
The ammount people are prepared to pay for goods varies with how rich they are and with existing norms in their country. Therefore the pricepoint that balances number of sal
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Simpler? yes, more profitable? no.
You sure? I will not buy region locked crap. And in spite of what my mother told me, I am not that special. When you can get a better quality product for free with a little more trouble, some people choose that route.
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"Sometimes I wonder why companies, especially companies selling digital goods, don't just set the price in one particular currency then let it somewhat auto-fluctuate in the other currencies according to the market."
The concept you are looking for is "reservation price". Strictly speaking, ever buyer has a different maximum price they are willing to spend and the seller would like to charge them each that different price. In some situations that's easy (negotiated sales contracts) and some situations that's
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"Didn't the rouble lose like a million percent of its value against the dollar in a day or something?"
Ummmm not quite. The rouble has lost roughly 50% of its value against the US dollar over the last two years.
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The rouble has lost roughly 50% of its value against the US dollar over the last two years.
For values of two years that are rather closer to six months.
Re:Why Steam? Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's say the game costs 10 times less in Russia. You ask Russian friend to buy it for you but you send him twice the amount required. That means you both got the game for 1/5th of the U.S.A. price. The game creators and Steam lose.
Let's say Steam increases the price in Russia so that it matches the U.S. dollar value. Your Russian friend can no longer afford games. Your friend, the game creators and Steam lose.
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I would expect the sales will have a positive marginal profit, that is the costs directly associated with the sale will be less than the income directly associated with the sale.
Of course having a positive marginal profit on every sale does not mean you will make a profit overall (and thus be able to stay in buisness). To do that you need to cover all your fixed costs too. It's perfectly possible that selling to everyone at the russian price would not cover the fixed costs but selling to russians at that pr
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This is the bit that fucks me off.
IT industry wages are depressed because of competition in regions of the world with lower costs of living.
So I get paid less, but I still have to subsidise their fucking computer games? Sorry but that's just fucking inequitable.
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So if a game is $50 in the US, and it costs "10 times less" in Russia, does it mean that it's 10x$50=$500 less than the US price and that Valve will pay me $450 to take it off their hands?
Or did you mean "one tenth"?
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So if a game is $50 in the US, and it costs "10 times less" in Russia, does it mean that it's 10x$50=$500 less than the US price and that Valve will pay me $450 to take it off their hands?
Or did you mean "one tenth"?
"times less" moves the x10 to the other side of the equation.
Such as $50=10x$5
Which is the same as $50/10=$5
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So what I hear you proposing is that the price in the USA should be 10x higher to subsidize Russian gamers. Sorry but no, Communism was done away with a long time ago. This is absurdity.
Simple solution: Don't buy Steam games. Easy peasy and they lose out all over the place. Any vendor who tries this junk should go down in flames.
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Let's say the game costs 10 times less in Russia.
Whoa, there. The game costs 1000% less? They're paying me 10x the cost of the game to take it off their hands? Where do I sign up?
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Let's say the game costs 10 times less in Russia. You ask Russian friend to buy it for you but you send him twice the amount required. That means you both got the game for 1/5th of the U.S.A. price. The game creators and Steam lose.
Which is exactly what's supposed to happen. If it's economically feasible for the game creators and Steam to sell games at 10% of the price in Russia, there's one of either two things happening:
1) The price they're selling for in Russa is sufficient to recoup their costs, and they're gouging Americans
2) They're forcing US customers to subsidise low Russian prices
"Region Locking" is really just digital protectionism. It's a way to let companies reap the benefits of globalism, while locking consumers out from
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By that logic, why don't they sell games cheaper in the west to people on lower incomes?
Re:Why Steam? Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
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What do you imagine "selling at a loss" even means, when your marginal-cost-per-sale is as near zero as makes no difference?
Of course publishers will set the price of a game as high as they think they can, for the volume of sales they want to achieve. What else would you expect them to do? What would you do?
If you think a game is overpriced, here's an idea: don't buy it.
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If I want to convert my dollars to rubels and take a chance on how volatile the currency is, why can't I?
You can. Money markets are available for you to invest in.
What's fair about letting which side of an imaginary line you live on dictate the price?
Maybe the law in Russia that says you can't sell things in US Dollars? Otherwise Steam could just set a US Dollar price and let the exchanges sort it out.
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Pirates will always have something to morally justify it to their own conscience, there's no point pandering to them.
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Pirates will always have something to morally justify it to their own conscience, there's no point pandering to them.
Supporting the 4th amendment is pandering to pirates now? Because the media industry wants it gone from the Internet, or any electronic devices...
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If you're seriously considering pirating the game over this, you probably weren't a customer to begin with.
Not necessarily, I've seen price used as a reason for piracy before. Specifically, if something is considered to be greatly overpriced, there's a better chance it will be pirated rather than normally bought.
Re:Why Steam? Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
You have a DRM system that is the least hated (and actually liked in some cases) by the users of any. (And the Linux support is appreciated by a LOT of folks, including me.) Doing this will only fan the flames of hate for a very small increase in revenue. Because people will move or travel, and all there games will stop working, and they will post it all over the net. And you will get zero sympathy for this crap.
I don't see ANYTHING about games ceasing to work. This only prevents you from gifting a game (purchasing on another user's behalf).
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Because you never tried to gift it?
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Because you purchased it while geographically located in Russia, using a Russian Steam account, a Russian billing address and a Russian credit cart (or Russian PayPal account or whatever)?
You can't easily accomplish these things by just "buying it from a Russian site".
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Because the Ruble just tanked to the ground of the ocean due to what if I recall correctly is oil prices, and because there are sites that, traditionally, have taken advantage of this thing by re-selling keys from different regions. This has, thus far, been tolerated, but with one currency from a large region with a big PC gaming market losing value like it current is, there simply is no way Valve could reasonably continue to do so.
Resellers (Score:3, Insightful)
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One can be "in Russia" (virtually) quite easily, and use a Russian payment method as well. So what does this accomplish?
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Are you serious?
I've stopped playing games on disks because it's so annoying. I definitely prefer Steam over a disk check.
Though I play primarily indie games, so most of my Steam games are non-DRM anyway.
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No, a simple disc check is least hated. This is exactly the problem with Steam, they control all of your games and can deny access any time they want. GOG.com is the way to do game distribution correctly. No artificially required, resource using, spyware client and no DRM in the games.
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No, a simple disc check is least hated.
Since when? I thought Mac computers were shipping without an optical drive now, as were many Windows laptops. Or is a USB SuperDrive optical drive [apple.com] something every Mac owner is supposed to buy?
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FYI: My high end laptop, which was purchased this year, has a slot loading Blu-Ray burner.
And there's a pattern to this. Among laptops that ship with Windows, only the larger ones tend to come with optical drives. For example, Ultrabook laptops tend to omit one.
Many of us in EU already are region locked (Score:2)
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You have a DRM system that is the least hated (and actually liked in some cases) by the users of any.
The fact they have DRM at all speaks volumes of what they think of gamers, the fact that people like you think corporations give a damn when they've been steadily taking your rights away is proof most of mankind is hopeless.
Georgia (Score:1)
Come on, give us some credit. Maybe it's just because I don't live in the US that I'm aware that there's a country called Georgia.
It's like in most Hollywood movies when they write "Beijing, China", or "Paris, France", but then write "San Francisco, California".
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It's like in most Hollywood movies when they write "Beijing, China", or "Paris, France", but then write "San Francisco, California".
What do you want them to do? Write "San Francisco, the United States of America"? That is about as practical as "Skopje, the former Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia".
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Yes. San Franscisco, USA.
What, California's now a country? The size of fucking China?
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To be fair, the way the US is SUPPOSED to work (it doesn't, really, anymore) is that the individual states are sovereign and the feds provide an overarching protection on a global scale as well as help to regulate interstate commerce. San Francisco, United States wouldn't fit that depiction. For example, there are 24 locations known as "Washington" in the United States, not just DC or the State. There are 22 Springfields, not just Illinois. There are 21 Salems, not just Massachusetts. Considering the states
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I do not consider myself to be US-centric nor uneducated, but prior to the incident at the Winter Olympics in 2010 where a luge athlete from Georgia was killed during a training run [wikipedia.org], and here in Vancouver, the host city for the Olympics that year, this incident was pretty major news. I had no idea previously that there was evidently a country that was also called Georgia, although I had certainly heard of the US state by the same name. I'm aware of the country now, obviously, and even learned where it wa
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I do not consider myself to be US-centric nor uneducated, but prior to the incident at the Winter Olympics in 2010 where a luge athlete from Georgia was killed during a training run [wikipedia.org], and here in Vancouver, the host city for the Olympics that year, this incident was pretty major news. I had no idea previously that there was evidently a country that was also called Georgia, although I had certainly heard of the US state by the same name.
Sorry, but you sound pretty uneducated.
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Well, it it makes any difference, I graduated from high school over 8 years before Georgia became independent of the USSR, so in retrospect, I don't think it's surprising that I wasn't taught about the country in school.
Anyways, I learned that it was a country upon hearing the aforementioned news of the athlete who died in the Olympics that year, and honestly, I was only able to tell it was a country from the context. Only the logical incongruity of mentioning a specific US state for an athlete was suf
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I was in grade school during that period and I don't remember them covering the former USSR states much. It might have been a regional thing.
Putin is in trouble (Score:2)
Millions of Russian hardcore gamers are now pissed off, where they didn't give a shit about politics previously.
He is doomed!!!
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Why would they care? This doesn't affect them. Their prices aren't changing.
Blah blah DRM blah blah (Score:5, Insightful)
You can still buy a game in one location and play it in another, you just can't gift it to someone else's account in another region.
I'm okay with that; despite what some people here will argue (free market blah blah) I'd sooner see purchase restrictions like this than expect people in poor countries to pay a week's wages for a game or movie or album.
As long as they don't start making content only available in certain regions, they're making the best of a bad situation.
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Then perhaps eastern European video game developers ought to be making a killing on Linux versions of their games that users can afford because they didn't have to buy Windows for their gaming PCs.
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What makes you think that Windows is less forcibly bundled with new PCs in eastern Europe than anywhere else?
The fact that it's still possible to build a desktop PC from parts.
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I see nothing to indicate this region lock stops anyone from buying games from the US Steam store. All it does is stops people who aren't in Russia from buying from the Russian Steam store at Russian prices and people who are in Russia from buying from the Russian Steam store then gifting the game to someone not in Russia.
Pretect for more draconian DRM (Score:2, Insightful)
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Maybe, but many people (including myself) will just go back to piracy. I buy lots of games on steam because it's a solid platform and they (historically) aren't assholes. If they want to change that, I can easily get my games on the real open market.
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"Maybe, but many people (including myself) will just go back to piracy. I buy lots of games on steam"
Problem is all new games will be locked to a backend server as technology advances. Notice Starcraft 2 and diablo 3 are always online, two major games. Corporations have made huge inroads against gamers rights. The vast majority of the gaming masses are too illiterate and stupid to know how they are fucking the intelligent half of the gaming community over and completely fucking over game preservation.
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"adds", typo for "ads", short for "advertisements", which is an immersion-breaking way that some video game developers cover costs that the sticker price alone won't cover.
Inherantly anti-first-world-consumer (Score:3, Interesting)
Ugh...
Region locks are vile practice. It's infuriating to see them creeping into PC gaming (historically a region-free platform) at a time when two of the three console developers have ditched them and the third (Nintendo) is considering dropping them. That said, it's worth reflecting on why they exist. There are, historically, two reason behind this.
The first is plain old-fashioned cultural stereotyping (which somebody being less diplomatic might call "racism"). This is the classic Nintendo reason. Big paternalist companies like Nintendo (they're not alone in this, but are the worst offenders) have this weird outlook that says that they should function as some kind of moral arbiter of what should and should not be available in each territory. Hence certain games are "not a good cultural fit for some regions" (usually a view based on offensive broad-brush stereotypes... or racism, if you prefer the more honest term) or "require alterations to be culturally appropriate" (meaning "we're going to cut the game to hell on release in some territories, because REASONS"). Happily, this particular driver behind region locking is on the decline. Sony used to buy into it every bit as much as Nintendo, but have completely washed their hands of it. Even Nintendo are considering getting out of this game. I should add that a few territories (a handful of religious-wacko countries, plus Germany and Australia - what good company they find themselves in) set up their own barriers that require these kind of locks on occasion. In those cases, the blame rests with the Governments of those countries, not the platform owners/publishers.
The second reason is more complex and is down to differential pricing. Not every currency is of the same strength or stability. The last few days have made that pretty clear, if it wasn't already. And by and large, a lot of those countries which have weak and/or unstable currencies also tend to have very high piracy rates. A lot of companies (Microsoft used to be particularly bad in this respect, but have been stepping back lately) operate under the delusion that if they sell their products really really cheap in those territories, they can get people to buy legitimately, rather than pirating their products (all the evidence to date shows this doesn't work). Problem is, when you do that, you create a huge reverse-import problem; why would a US or European consumer pay the going rate in their territory for a locally-bought copy, when they could import a Brazillian or Russian or Vietnamese copy for a fraction of the price (which probably has English-language support anyway)?
Now, in a pure free market, one of two things would happen. Either the company selling the product would have to drop its price globally, or else it would have to accept that customers in those marginal economies just couldn't, for the most part, afford its products. But we live in a world where they're allowed to circumvent the free-market at will - via region locks. So first-world consumers get to subsidise producers (usually fruitless) speculation in developing-world markets.
There's a curious mirror image of this around one particular market; Japan. See, Japanese consumers are willing to pay massively over the odds for media (movies, games, TV series both live action and animated), particularly when said media is domestically produced. Seriously, you think UK or Australian consumers pay over the odds? It's nothing to what they'll pay in Japan. And because Japan has a large media industry which has grown accustomed to being able to milk this unquestioningly loyal (and seemingly happy to be exploited) domestic market, a good chunk of it is desperate to keep said market behind a walled garden, with reverse importing from the rest of the world locked off.
So yeah... region locking... a few reasons for it, none of them good for the consumer. Truly sad to see it come to Steam (though it's been creeping in at the margins for a while now). The only alternative? Fix all regions' price to the dollar (allowing for differences in local sales taxes, which is the major difference, for instance, between US and UK prices). But then a good chunk of the world wouldn't be able to afford to buy anything like as many games.
Nope. That's not what happened here... (Score:5, Insightful)
And, none of those reasons are why region locking was added to Steam.
Further, it's not region locking like you described and railed against. All Steam did is wall off a handful of regions where the local currencies are extremely volatile, and even then ONLY for accounts gifting games to one another between the rest of the world and these tiny regions.
Your butthurt is misguided here. Let the strawman go.
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All Steam did is wall off a handful of regions where the local currencies are extremely volatile, and even then ONLY for accounts gifting games to one another between the rest of the world and these tiny regions.
And, I believe the gifting restriction is only for purchases using real money.
Right now, Steam has promotion where you get "tokens" (for lack of a better term) from game achievements and can use those to buy games. Those tokens have the same value in all regions, so if you buy a game with tokens, you can gift it to anyone else, regardless of any gifting restrictions on purchased games.
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Right now, Steam has promotion where you get "tokens" (for lack of a better term) from game achievements and can use those to buy games. Those tokens have the same value in all regions, so if you buy a game with tokens, you can gift it to anyone else, regardless of any gifting restrictions on purchased games.
Steam gems are gotten from the turning various cards you get from playing various games on Steam (it's based on the game and the amount of time played as opposed to achievements.
Those tokens are actually an auction, so unless you're the highest bidder, you get nothing.
Incidentally, said auction ends later today, to be immediately followed with the Steam Winter/Summer sale.
(I'm too lazy to see if /. support upside down text for Summer)
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All Steam did is wall off a handful of regions where the local currencies are extremely volatile
The second reason is more complex and is down to differential pricing. Not every currency is of the same strength or stability.
...
ONLY for accounts gifting games to one another between the rest of the world and these tiny regions
Problem is, when you do that, you create a huge reverse-import problem; why would a US or European consumer pay the going rate in their territory for a locally-bought copy
Yeah, sorry bud. He exactly described what they did and why. They want to be able to take advantage of the Russian economy to target Russian consumers, but don't want to allow consumers to benefit from the same economic fluctuations.
Maybe you should work on your literacy levels instead of spending time thinking of insulting things to say about people whose posts you apparently can't comprehend.
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Breaking the region-locking is illegal because of the DMCA. The DMCA is a law, and is inherently non-free-market.
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The DMCA was implemented by elected lawmakers.
Those lawmakers have not been removed from office, with new law makers installed with a mandate to remove DMCA.
Therefore, the market has voted (with votes, rather than dollars) for the DMCA.
Game pricing (Score:2)
Game pricing is great mystery. I tend to buy my games in the UK. Even with shipping they are 30% below the German prices.
Buying games here locally feels like being ripped off. And the price difference to other countries is even bigger....
German dubbing (Score:2)
How much of that 30% is the cost of dubbing the voice acting into German? In Great Britain, they can get away with selling the US version, as American is still mutually intelligible with British English.
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The version bought in the UK have German voice acting as option. But I play my games in English anyway. German voice acting is usually cheaply done and prone to insert errors instead of humor.
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I *think* Germany is one of the countries with a game rating mafia that insists on changes to their version of the game in order to authorize it's sale in country. Wikipedia agrees at first glance [wikipedia.org] with "Censorship of motion pictures, video games and Internet sites hosted in Germany are considered to be the strictest in the European Union."
Ergo more programming expense as they have to make the blood cool-aid colored, make it seem like all the bad guys are actually robots, etc...
The voice acting may be part
Are account regions locked? (Score:3)
The reason I ask is if VPN could get around this. For example, getting the NHL (ice hockey) package cost $150 in the US. My friend noticed that the cost through a European IP was only $100. He saved $50 just by masking his IP and there is no need to mask his IP when streaming the games live.
I am curious if something similar could get around the Steam issue.
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I can't check until tonight when I get home from work but are account regions locked? I know mine currently shows the US but when I travel to Japan next month, will it update?
Disclaimer: AC mentioned it's against the TOS, but I've done it in the past - Military deployed to the middle east, various countries. I've had issues where I 'had' to use my VPN* in order to purchase games on steam due to mismatches between my local IP and my CC(payment method). Even picked up some cheaper games in a couple spots.
I didn't receive any bans, but given that I was actually *in* the foreign country, but VPN's back to the USA in order to use my US credit card to buy a game for my US steam acc
Georgia and Georgia, silly use of hyperlinks (Score:2)
Note: This Georgia, rather than this one, that is.
You could have actually said which Georgias you were talking about, instead of requiring someone to visit (or at least hover over) the links. Hyperlinks are great and all, but using them to disambiguate plain text when better-written text would have solved the problem is a bit silly. For example:
"Note: that's Georgia the Eastern European country, rather than Georgia the US state."
If nothing else, it would probably make it a lot less confusing for anyone relying on a screen reader.
Re:Georgia and Georgia, silly use of hyperlinks (Score:4, Informative)
It was pretty obvious what they meant even without looking at the hyperlinks.
Obsolete move? (Score:2)
Is it an obsolete move? Russia Central Bank decided to fight back against speculators yesterday. Rouble is up again, and Russia Central Bank USD reserves are huge enough (480 billion IIRC) for them to cause losses to speculators for a while.
If they insist, then profit is not their motivation, that would suggest they are state-backed.
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Well, at least Russians won't freeze to death this winter. They can use wheelbarrows full of rubles to insulate their homes. ;)
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Russia has a large nuclear arsenal and submarine fleet, the only heavy lift rockets on Earth worth a damn, a LOT of land and a LOT of coast.
Economic problems won't break an established super power - they'll lash out and attack others and steal their shit before they collapse. (See the actions of the USofA.)
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and you can buy a simulation [steampowered.com] of this on steam!
Copyright expiry differs (Score:2)
I was under the impression that some region coding exists because of different copyright laws. It might be legal to sell a game in Europe but not in the United States if it's based on a work whose copyright has expired in the European Union (70 years after publication for works made for hire) but not in the United States (95 years after publication for works made for hire), or vice versa (US: 95 years after publication for 1923-1977 individual works; EU: 70 years after death of last surviving author for all
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For one thing, the SCOTUS ruling applies to selling individual physical copies. The Steam, Nintendo eShop, PlayStation Store, and Xbox Live Marketplace services make a new copy on each machine where a game is installed. So the first sale rule about importation of a lawfully made copy doesn't quite apply.
And even in the case of disc games, differences in copyright term can still make a copy "not lawfully made". Let me give a more concrete example: Say there was a book written in 1925 by someone who died in 1
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For one thing, the SCOTUS ruling applies to selling individual physical copies. The Steam, Nintendo eShop, PlayStation Store, and Xbox Live Marketplace services make a new copy on each machine where a game is installed. So the first sale rule about importation of a lawfully made copy doesn't quite apply.
And even in the case of disc games, differences in copyright term can still make a copy "not lawfully made". Let me give a more concrete example: Say there was a book written in 1925 by someone who died in 1940, and someone adapts it into a video game. Thus the video game is a derivative work of the book. Selling a copy of the game in Europe is legal because the copyright in the book expired at the end of 2010. Selling a copy of the game in the US would not be legal until the end of 2020. Under what logic would the derivative become legal to sell in the US just because it was lawfully sold in another country with a shorter copyright term?
Next time, try reading a post before you respond to it.
Legal to sell in Europe. Buy in Europe. Bring to US.
TADA!
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Buy in Europe.
How much would that plane ticket cost?
Bring to US.
Do you have anything to declare at the border?
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No idea. I don't get on the plane. I use electrons to tell other people to put it on a plane or a boat with a bunch of other items destined for this country and they do so affordably. When the goods are electronic this is even easier (I'll leave the "why" as an exercise for the reader.)
I do declare you're an idiot.
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When the goods are electronic this is even easier
When the goods are electronic, you are making the copy yourself. (I can dig up court cases if you want.) If the copyright on the underlying work is still in effect, you are violating the law.
VAT mess (Score:2)
Sales tax and the cost of complying with the #VATMESS [techcrunch.com] are included in the price in EUR countries but not in the USD country. That alone makes up for an exchange rate on the order of 1 USD = 0.8 EUR.
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I will never buy anything in the EU until they stop their 1 USD equals 1 EUR scam.
It's not a scam.
OK, lets take a specific example.
In the US, a new AAA game is generally $60 pre-tax... which is 48.6€ using current exchange rates.
With me so far? OK, so the US price is ready to list on Steam because US price listings don't include taxes. However, the EU version isn't, because EU requires that VAT be included in the price.
So... lets take Italy for example. VAT in Italy* is 22%. So... the same price that lists for $60 USD would list for... 59.292€. Suddenly the 1:1 ratio makes
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When developers in Russia stop accepting work for companies in the UK then I'll consider giving a fuck about them getting to buy the same fucking products at half the price that they're available to me.
Globalisation has to work both ways.
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So you never outsource your artwork or modelling or packaging or any other part of your development process?
Because other independent developers that I know do. And they outsource to Eastern Europe because the people there speak English and are very very cheap. Which means less work available locally, which means more competition for jobs, which means lower ages. Yet I still have to pay 8 times the fucking price of people in the country that helped write the software?
Sorry but pick option B. It's a global f