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Regional Pricing


SAS

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Hello!

First of all I mean no offence in my next writing at all. The game is great and developers are the best.

The reason I'm writing this lies in today regional changes in Steam. Namely with the separation of the Ukrainian region from the CIS region and the inclusion of Ukrainian Hryvnia currency.

The game ARK and all of its DLCs and season pass, Explorer Edition and so on are unavailable to purchase. The reason is very probably that Studio Wildcard haven't yet set the price for our region.

While the setting of the price is just the matter of time, the prices of the game and the content worry me a lot.

Recently, when the game leaved the Early Access the price in Ukraine has become $40 while in Russia it costed 55% less.

I might point you that the price for Ukraine is incredibly high and I'll try to explain my words.

First of all the salaries, pensions and living wage and the purchasing power in general in Ukraine is around four times lesser then in Russia. Our economy is in the deepest crisis putting it on the same level as poor African countries.

A great amount of public sector employees live for a month income of ₴3200 (~$120) or even less. The science, education, medicine fields etc. are ruined. For example I, as a theoretical physics researcher earn a little more than $90 a month! Doctors have around $120-135 monthly, university lecturers have around $120 and most professors of science earn not much greater than $190+ for a whole month.

So you understand that an arbitrary Ukrainian faces a choice - to buy a game on steam for $40 or to survive. For most developed countries $40 is to go once in a café on a weekend but in Ukraine you must fit all your food for 30 days inside $40.

There is another side of thinking about the fair pricing.

Ukraine region recently was #12 region by steam online globally. But vast majority players play only free games. You could think of it as there are millions of players in Ukraine, the gaming culture is extremely strong here but they just couldn't afford buying a legit game from a legit store. So a great majority of Ukrainians either play freeware or play pirated.

My point is with fair pricing the almost absent Ukrainian market can have a great potential proportional to its player base. You may sell hundreds of thousand copies of a game for affordable price or a few hundred for prices like usual.

To conclude I hope that when the game becomes available to purchase in Ukraine again it will be priced fairly (I think 0.25-0.5-1x of Russian price but I am no economist) so many thousands of Ukrainian players could play this great game, enjoy it and support the developers with what they can.

 

Best regards,

Oleksandr Stepanenko

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