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Dominion Online at Shuffle iT / Re: Subscription pricing & structure
« on: January 01, 2017, 09:09:10 am »I think it's pretty normal to sell digital goods & services for different prices depending on region. The reason you do it is that the profit-maximizing price may be different depending on region, such as because of different price sensitivity. ($3/month may not sound expensive in the US/EU/etc., but it may be pretty expensive in developing countries.)Providing pricing in the end users currency would be good - I'm personally unhappy about the pricing model as it becomes _so expensive_ (I'm In Australia, with current exchange rate the $3 a month price actually equals almost $5 a month AUD so over $50 a year)
Considering the pricings for other countries (there are a LOT of other nationalities playing then just europe) and how that compares to their home currency / average incomes etc would be a good idea.
I can _deal_ with $50 a year, but I'd be concerned about countries who don't have amazing exhange rates with the euro who also have a lower average annual income, this would be effectively excluding them from playing.
I... have never heard of a company doing this. It would be a good way of losing money, I guess?
You can do this without losing money because not all of the $3/month is used to pay server costs. Making up numbers, imagine that $0.10/month goes to server upkeep and the remaining $2.90/month is used to pay for continuing development (and kept as profit if that cost is met). Then you can price anywhere up of $0.10/month without losing money on the servers, and you just need to make sure that over your entire userbase (which includes all regions, not just the poor ones), you make enough to pay for development.
I'd go further than that. The server costs might be $.10 per person per month, but the additional cost of adding a user to the server is likely much less than $.10 a month, so even if someone in a developing nation is only paying something over that cost there's the possibility of profit.
That said, I don't know what the contract specifies, there may be a flat per-set/user royalty rather than a % of earnings. That would tend to make sense to me unless the money involved here is large enough to make the cost of annual financial audits a minor expense -- so there may be a cost per-user that doesn't fit into pure financial logic.