**Mastery Loadouts**
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
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That's promising, I guess.
Edit: Now this is really interesting. There is something called alternate tiers, where you can set different prices for developing and underdeveloped countries and India comes under this. So, only for specific countries, the price tier can be changed.
If you take that off then the ex-tax price is $147.80, which is only $5.60 off the current NZD-USD conversion rate of 1.42:1, and well within reason for historical currency fluctuations if you were going to choose a local Odin price in New Zealand.
I'm assuming that the Google Play Store has to use the same prices, because something being cheaper on Google Play wouldn't make sense?
Let us say someone lives in Australia and gets X units for Y *currency*, which is Z% of their monthly income. If they bought the price in let us say US, they would still get X units in-game, but for Y' *currency*, which would convert to Z'% of their monthly income.
As a result, people could actually save money by living in Australia and buying for US prices, which (in theory) could save them money. Same could got for maybe US and India? Idk, I just picked two countries at random. Point is, how does Apple prevent this? With VPN and maybe even foreign country bank accounts, this could be very well hidden. And for whales who spend tens of thousands of dollars, this could be quite a money saver.
I will give an example: I live in Czech Republic, a tiny state in the central Europe. Our currency is CZK (czech crown) and is usually around 25 CZK = 1 USD.
Odins in the US: $99.99 / 3100 units
Odins in Czech Rep.: 2490 CZK / 3100 units
Current conversion rate is 1 USD = 21.99 CZK. Compared to US, here an Odin would cost $113.23
If I bought the US offer, I would pay 2199 CZK per Odin. It's 1.25 Unit/1 CZK versus 1.41 Unit/1 CZK
Now I will try to compare to Seatin:
Up until December 2020, he spent $65k. That is 650 Odins. If he lived here, he'd have to pay approximately $8.6k more for the same amount of units. Which is quite a lot if you think about it, so what would prevent a local whale from getting the offers for US prices?
You may yourself be committing a crime when you do this though. If for example you're evading your own localities taxes when you do this.
You can't even set the price arbitrarily. For example you can sell a tier 1 item for 0.99 USD or a tier 2 item for 1.99 USD, but you can't sell an item for $1.50. That's literally impossible. Apple and Google have fixed codes corresponding to fixed prices, and you can only choose one. You cannot fill in the blank on pricing.
Also, back when I F2P microtransaction games first really started appearing in their current form, I was told the conversion rate for players (the percentage of free to play players that eventually spend money) was 5-8%. These days with most gaming happening much more casually and on mobile devices, I've been told that number has fallen into the 1%-3% range and it doesn't really budge much across different games and monetization strategies. The simple fact is, f2P gaming creates the opportunity to play for free, and most casual gamers take that opportunity.
I don't even think that is a bad thing: the idea that the goal of an F2P gaming company should be to convert all their players into spenders is I think flawed. We have a simple way to do that: return to subscription gaming. And yet few games do this, probably because while everyone wants more spenders and more money, they know it isn't actually a good thing to do more than marginally improve matters.
When too many people spend and the spending advantage becomes too obvious and too ubiquitous, it discourages many casual free to play players from picking up your game. But those are your future spenders you're cutting off.
I'm moving to America!