Hello, I live in Brazil and the subscription price is very prohibitive for us here in South America and other poor countries, for comparison:
1 month of Omega/Monthly Minimum Wage
USA: $20 / $1160 - 1,73%
Brazil: R$100 / R$1320 - 7,57%
Comparatively, the difference is much higher due to us having a weaker currency. Is there any way we can get regional pricing for monthly subscription, please?
I know there are concerns about people using VPN to buy subscriptions at lower rates, but you can easily manage that verifying the billing address and also where the credit card comes from…
We have regional prices for lots of games on Steam with no problem at all.
Türkiye has a %100 tax on all items that are bought in USD, thought that was awful, but near %8 of a monthly salary is something else. Garuntee you that if Brazil can get regional pricing someone is going to VPN in and buy a decade of EVE at a discounted rate. Pretty sure the russian EVE steam page got a big adjustment a couple years ago after the currency lost over half its value on the international market in 5 years.
This is easy to track. They might get away with it for a month but unless they stay on that VPN to play for at least a year, it will be noticed or like steam you have regional access, in other words, if the account has purchases in a regionally priced place, it will block all connections from outside of that area and ping CCP. I doubt that would be an issue at all. People who try to abuse the system lose all omega time on the account for the first time and get permanently banned if caught doing it again.
We brought it up in the past, specifically with Brazil. I want to say it was a few years ago because I recall someone asking me to do it. This type of thing is dicey because of VPNs and the like. Nothing came of it then. I can ask one of the current guys if they’ll bring it up again, but we don’t usually talk very often to the folks purely on the money side of things.
It’s the same with South Africa, the new subs are just not realistic.
So what does one do. Plenty of markets got ejected from this and are hung out to dry, and so far so good, they haven’t walked back on any of it, so it must be working for them, cool.
Why not see this as an opportunity, maybe? There’s some pretty incredible dev talent in Brazil and Turkey, maybe ask around locally and try to convince some devs there to tackle CCP, maybe create something that directly competes with EVE with a focus on real world class-inclusivity? They’d already have them beat in costs. This whole situation doesn’t necessarily have to be a funeral.
While EVE is fun and all, it’s not as technically mystical anymore, it’ll probably not be too difficult for modern devs with modern tools to creatively re-iterate the entire thing.
I would really appreciate it if you can bring this up again, there are ways to verify the identity of people to ensure they’re using the regional prices in the intended country, i.e: CCP can send a letter from time to time with a verification code to the player’s address. Or you can just ask for people who want to pay with the regional prices to verify their national I.D with CCP…
It has already been done in Roblox three or four years ago. Starting area is ‘The Citadel’ and you fly a ship around mining. Apparently it is still around but now called Starscape.
Its a clever scam