lehphyro said:
I think it's more a hint to devs/publishers on how they can get money from him and other people like him rather than an excuse.
Exactly. I have the money to pay for it. $25 may be very low for the US but it is pricey for other countries, this specific case translates to lost sales actually.
Well, there are two problems - knee-jerk reactions when people see games as the same as material goods and are offended by the idea of selling games at lower price somewhere and a possibility of someone "resourceful" re-selling the games in the west.
The first is completely irrational - as practically nothing is removed from inventory when the game is sold. When goods are in limited amount and when they require expensive raw materials, then keeping high prices helps to maximise the income.
In case of goods like computer games, the most important thing for maximisation of profits is the balance between the price and the amount of sales.
Theoretically, there are some people that would pay over 100$ for computer games, even for indie games and would moralize how everyone should pay that much, but prices are set much lower, because what would happen in reality would be losing most of customers and having a big part of the customers that stay buy less games, which would mean lesser profits and probably many games flopping. The same applies to the rest of the world.
Anyway, personally, I'd rather eat out in a local restaurant and buy myself a few CDs of good local Black Metal bands than pay the western price much for a "premium" cRPG and most of other new games (unless it would be Falloutlike GURPS or similar system based cRPG in which case I would probably dish out even 50-100$ for a collectors edition
- but that's a very, very, very rare type of game - the only one that has chance to come close it is AoD.).
Vintage games are an exception from it - but it's mostly due to their limited availability and collectors value.