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this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2024
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Yeah, the idea has always been that you pay for the base game (and any expansion you want to play) to unlock access to the content, then you pay a subscription for the time you want to play. The base game pays for the writers, artists, etc. to make a game, the subscription pays for the servers, the ops people, etc. that allow you to play it live with thousands of other players.
This is the real problem. I don't understand how anybody does business in Argentina. Inflation must make it almost impossible to have a profitable business. But, if you live in Argentina you just have to adapt. But, international businesses must look at it and say it's not worth it.
Before this change, US WoW players were paying about $15/month for their subscription, but in Argentina they were paying 650 ARS, the equivalent of about $0.75 with today's exchange rate. At that rate, I assume Blizzard was losing money on each subscription. The new price is $15 USD. That's way out of reach for a lot of Argentinians, so they'll lose almost all of their Argentinian subscribers. But, like anywhere, Argentina has some rich people, and some of them will keep playing.
I'm sure there are some people at Blizzard who are upset that they had to cut off their Argentinian subscribers. But, I assume there are a lot of bean counters who are relieved that they're no longer exposed to the shitshow that is dealing with Argentina's currency.
I'm not really a fan of the subscription model, and want no part in WOW (also because the single game life suck is definitely not my thing), but WOW has been doing it for a long time, and in a way that they actually do have meaningful recurring costs per user to provide.
But yeah, hosting isn't magically cheaper because you're in a country with a broken economy, or a lot more stuff would already be hosted there. And the absurd tax rate doesn't pay any of their costs, so basically doesn't matter to their pricing. Supporting a broken hyper volatile currency is just not worth doing.
Yeah, it almost certainly costs them nowhere near $15/month per user. But, it's probably more than $1. They have "game masters" on call to help people who are experiencing a glitch or who are being harassed or something. They have ops people keeping the servers running, keeping the databases clean, rolling out the changes in a way that doesn't break things for players, fending off DDOS attacks and hack attempts, and so-on.
There are probably some things that are cheaper. Like, they can probably employ Argentines to staff the Spanish-language game-master jobs cheaper than if they have to pay Americans. If they host servers nearby for low latency, it's likely that the datacenters and the staff to run them can be cheaper than the US equivalent. But, it's not going to be 15x cheaper.
OTOH, there are probably lots of things that are more expensive. I'd imagine that in a country with the problems that Argentina has, you're more likely to have brown-outs or black-outs from the power station. And the main headache will just be tracking the pricing for things. If some cosmetic add-on costs $2 US, you maybe have to revise that cost once every 3-4 years. But, if it costs 1000 Argentine pesos, you probably have to check it out every month or so. Plus, any contracts Blizzard/Microsoft has with any Argentinian partner, say for Internet service, probably has to be renegotiated constantly to deal with the latest inflation figures.
Argentina turning into a land of private servers wouldn't surprise me, and once you lose these people to private servers they aren't coming back.
Don't even have to pay for the base game (which is everything except the current expansion) now. The game is free for the first 20 levels (with social interaction restrictions) and with the rescaling at the end of the last expac meaning you can play those 20 levels in pretty much any part of the world (of warcraft).
The current xpac is a one off cost still, with the sub required to access the end game levels and remove all the social restrictions.