Why are CIS region prices so high?

[art-9]

I just checked price difference of some games in steamdb and its ridicilous how CIS countries (which are pretty damn poor) have to pay almost twice as russians and other richer countries for games.

This pricing just makes people rely on piracy more.

[cSg|mc-Hotsauce]

Publishers set the prices for their game ON Steam.

Ask them.

[wuddih]

Valve does recommend

a discounted USD price in the Commonwealth of Independent States and affiliated countries where we don't have local pricing. This is presented as a "CIS - USD" in the pricing tools. These countries are: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Ukraine.

and that is the case. please check at least 1000 titles, not just 5 mainstream games from big publishers that do not use Valves price recommendation tool anyway.

[art-9]

Well, thanks. Still its pretty dumb to set high prices in this region, i dont see the logic behind it

[wuddih]

Originally posted by Art:

Well, thanks. Still its pretty dumb to set high prices in this region, i dont see the logic behind it

supply and demand. they(bigger publishers) have no reason to drop the prices lower if there is no demand. for such cases you set a reasonable higher price that richer people from the target area can afford to maximize your profits. sounds unfair, but that is how global ecomics work for non-essential luxury products like video games work.

and i've just noticed that ukraine and kazakhstan are wrongly mentioned in my quote. they are no longer part of the CIS pricing and have their own pricing now, which makes sense. if i know people from this area because of gaming, they mostly coming from those 2 countries.
Valves price recommendation tool sets like 30-40% discount for those currencies compared to the usd price, which sounds fair to me and which is also the tools recommendation for CIS pricing ... but as said, bigger pubs do not use that and use their on research data.

piracy is not that big in some of the CIS countries, there are quite some reasonsable people that live there unlike in russia where piracy was and still is something like a lifestyle. the aggressive pricing for russia is partly to fight their piracy, which is world influencial. they were responsible for 30% of all piracy traffic on the internet at one point.