Complementary info about Business model of AGS?

General Discussion General Discussion
1

Hello, I have been seen many topics in those forums about lots of things, but what I will ask here is some more in-depth, and I think who’s new to de game may not understand at the start what I am asking.

Clear things 1st, almost 100% of the time when someone talks about some kind of discount for your region/server lot’s of people talk about Founder’s Pack, and it’s not what I am asking for here, try to understand and repeat the post like they raise the price of Turkey, etc… I AM NOT TALKING ABOUT FOUNDER’S PACK IN THIS POST.

Just to inform those who are new to the game, in Russian Server, you must log in to the site linked to your launched My.com, and then you can buy the Royal Crystals, and automatically will be credited to your in-game server account.

Now, that this is solved, let’s talk.

Because the difference in the value of some currencies is much more valuable than the others I am very concerned about this particular topic.

1 The first thing and the more important I want to know, is how we will put money in the game?
Since we will play at Valve Steam, and the game has just one direct real money currency(Royal Crystal), how we will buy the Royal Crystals?

Through Steam?
Through Official Web Site? Lost Ark - Free to Play MMO Action RPG (playlostark.com)

2 The second question I want to ask is, if it will be through the Oficial Web Site, each region of the servers will get a version of the Payment Cash Shop for each region/server?

This decision will make sense because if each region gets a piece of the site related to putting real money in the game link to your account and requiring the normal payment of that country, will avoid people changing the server to pay in lower prices countries because their payment option will not be accepted because he/she is not citizens of that country, or you can avoid all this trouble and demand to link the steam account on the site to pay for the Royal Crystals.

The game is getting close to release, each day, and we don’t know how to buy Royal Crystals.

PS. This comes to my mind because I wonder how it will be to buy them with the people of Turkey? They have a low currency even for us Brazilians, and I think is right to lower the price for them like did before in the founder’s pack, but, when the game is released, what will happen?
They will put money in the game based on USD? With this drastic difference in the value of the currency, I don’t think they will pay for the Royal Crystals if it will be that expensive.

In conclusion, and for us Brazilians, with taxes in international transactions, the value of the USD against our currency is almost 6 times more valuable than the Brazilian Real (called as BRL of EUA).

In my opinion, half of the USD price is a good spot, since our currency is 2 times more valuable than the Turkey currency, and it’s the same price practice by Genshin Impact here, 50% of the USD.

But, we don’t have yet an announcement about this important topic, and for some people could be the difference if they will play this game or not.

I hope I could be clear on my questions and opinions, and I hope AGS, when it’s ready, please answer this as possible as you can, because if the answer is not that good, people can move on with their lives.

I am not asking just for Brazilians and the people of Turkey, these answers could clarify things for everyone.

2

They could put different prices only by server region, otherwise people will find a way around it (myself included, heck why would i pay more if i can pay less)

3

If they use steam as DRM, people can try this, but it’s against valve steam rules, and people are aware of the danger to lose their entirely steam account with all your owned games.

And it’s very hard to do so, now steam is very restricted about this thing, you need a credit card of the country your steam account is linked and a real address, and if you try to buy a gift card only will work on the same country of your region of steam.

It’s a very hard step by step alongside VPN, to the end who tried this still be able to lose their account of steam at any time, in my case, if my country wasn’t whitelisted, I won’t try to breach this region lock, I have almost or more than 1K games on steam.

4

just like any other online steam game, we will pay through steam. I’d be extremely surprised for this not to be the case.

Tbh, my home country (Romania) has an average income lower than Brazil and I don’t recall ever getting regional pricing; certainly none through steam. Which really really sucks. Anyways, even though I don’t expect it to be a thing for me, I do hope regional pricing will happen for you guys.

Having said that, this is fundamentally a f2p game and whether regional pricing is available or not shouldn’t really affect whether you play it or not. Just my 2 cents.

5

Can confirm purchases for Royal Crystals and such in-game will be made through the Steam overlay popup (so through Valve/Steam)

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6

You don’t need a credit card that belong to the country, only an adress. My credit card is german, my steam account is french and I live in Belgium.
Ofc if there are regional prices i’ll find a way to pay less, and I know they can’t do nothing about it.

7

It’s not so much about using VPN to make purchase. It’s such an easy tool to abuse for RMT vendors. This is a game with shared economy across the server, and cash currency can be easily converted into ingame currency and allows 1:1 trade, mail attachment as well as free market auction house.

Now using VPN to abuse Steam pricing is still difficult but possible to catch (though I’m unclear on whether this would be mostly monitored and tracked by AGS or Valve) Bigger problem is that this simply promotes RMT vendors to take advantage of the situation. If a RMT vendor buys RC, purchase cosmetics or exchange for gold or even sell tradeable cash items for gold, then sell them for money, it creates additional layer of difficulty in terms of keeping a close control in the matter.

Not only does this create a loss of revenue on the publisher/developer side, it also affects in-game economy.

This is the very reason why many games these days choose to eliminate or heavily restrict any trade/market features. It takes a lot of resources for publisher/developers to take appropriate actions against these RMT vendors while there is very little risk or loss involved on the vendor’s side. In the meantime, any repercussion ultimately negatively affect all players;

This is a completely different situation compared to package games or non-tradeable items receiving regional pricing. It makes sense to do so for said items, even in Lost Ark, such as Beatrice’s blessings, but it’s not reasonable to implement said system for tradeable items at the cost of everyone else who are paying normal prices.

Any argument saying “but RMT is against ToS” is pointless. They’ve existed for decades and no studios have been able to effectively control or eliminate them without removing features from players. It’s also unreasonable to believe that AGS somehow found a miracle cure to this problem.

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8

@Krater

New Steam restriction makes it even harder to buy games from other regions (nme.com)

How to Change Your Steam Country With a VPN (and Not Get Banned) (wizcase.com)

Web capture_8-12-2021_84152_www.wizcase.com
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and, pay attention, ban on steam it’s not from the game, is account ban, all your owned games.
Steam Community :: Guide :: Bans on Steam

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Anything else? What were you saying?

9

Well first I changed my store location at august 13, so dunno about this “local” payment but my german card worked. Maybe coz it’s europe based and obviously the prices are the same in these 3 country (Belgium, France and Germany). I don’t know about Turkey, but after a quick search, I already found ways to do it.

Second they don’t ban on suspicion ofc. They need proofs and they can’t have it, coz it is life privacy. You can still have a nationality and work in another country, it’s nothing against the laws.

Third I should mention that as soon I changed my store country I stopped the VPN. So Valve know I am in Belgium with a french store but never got a msg or something from them.

Fourth, who is stupid enough to use his main steam account for that?

I would have prefer to not do that, but as AGS only goes trough steam, no choice.

10

EU → EU is not such problem. And it’s not just about “prices”. Your “local residence” and what country you are citizen of detemines taxes. And that matters a lot.

You can be so glad Valve (and other aggregate marketplaces like Google Play or Apple Store) solves this for you and deal with 100 different laws each of which deals with international payments and taxes differently but most of them requires a special treaty or registration if you are about to sell anything in such country.

And Valve (or anybody else) certainly doesn’t want to solve tax evading cases that might be brough on their heads if they allow it or make it obviously easy process.

So don’t be fooled by lack of knowledge. Money is traceable. So is your tax residece. It won’t trigger anything if you move to other country. But if every purchase is done in different part of a globe, or you are changing tax residence every week it might. These laws are evolving every year in terms of prohibiding tax evading. And while they are way behind technical capabilities they are catching it the further we go.

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11

it will probably be against ToS to buy packs from a place that isn’t your country to abuse the system to pay less. You’ll eventually get banned or blocked from purchases.

Steam won’t care but AG and SG will

12

Again, 3rd party RMT vendors are almost always against ToS.
Yet they still exist to this date, despite developers/publishers’ best efforts to remove them.
It’s not a matter of whether or not it’s against the rules.
It’s a matter of what’s ideal and what’s the reality.

13

I’m more worried about auction house flippers, they should be banned too

14

That’s hard to do with the pheons system. It can still be done but you have to increase the price a lot to compensate. At this point you wonder if the faulting party isn’t the seller itself for having set the price too low.

15

As Kyun mentioned, Pheons were implemented to prevent or discourage flippers and any abusive trading practices. (as well as serve as a “tax”)

I understand many are complaining about Pheons but that’s the actual purpose of their existence.

16

And milking these sweet $$ from playerbase.

It’s really not some player friendly currency if you imply that.

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17

You can buy pheons with blue crystals, thus gold. So if you are just buying for your chars, and not flipping stuff on the AH, you should have enough without needing to swipe.

18

As a side effect, yes. I’m not implying anything, just stating facts.
Whether you consider it necessary evil, or just unnecessary feature that’s extorting players, that’s reserved for individuals to decide. I’m simply stating the system was put in place as a control measure against AH abuse.

19

I just swipe on RU and that’s all. Don’t be mistaken, all pheons you have - someone had to swipe for the gems they cost and that is their true purpose of existing, so SG can get real money cut from every item trade in AH.

Not to combat them evil AH flippers, there’s transfer limit for that.

20

Yes I know I played on RU too. It’s a whole lot of intertwined systems that are designed to both “milk” players and avoid systems abuse. In the end, you either sell your time (gold traded for blue crystal) or swipe (royal/blue crystals, royal (converted to blue) traded for gold).

The only downside would be not having a single whale. That would fuck all F2P players. But it’s not gonna happen.