Idk, but I'm going to turn on my VPN and connect to Vietnam so I can pay WITH MY DONG!!!

Lmao, that game costs around 25% of Brazil's minimum monthly wage (R$1412), and a little over 10% of the average monthly wage (R$2924, according to a quick google search). And that doesn't take into account how expensive a gaming PC or console would be. An RTX 3060 costs around R$2000. I'm still rocking a GTX 1080, stretching it to its limits.

I've only bought two games over the past five years: Elden Ring and RDR2. I paid R$250 and R$200 for them, respectively. Everything else I either buy when I see a crazy discount, or I just pirate it.

It's hard to understate how fucking expensive everything is in Brazil, for someone who lives here and earns the local currency.

I think the answer is that the actual calculus is 'how much is this market-demographic willing to pay for our game'. Which is something that developers have to do on their own with multiple concerns in mind.

Some indie devs quickly turn countries like Brazil from their largest piracy market to their largest actual market just by giving them a bigger discount. Other devs don't have to care about that sort of thing, and assume that their niche / mainstream product will be bought regardless and that the gains from further discounts do not outweigh the discount themselves.

Hyperinflation accelerates the latter logic. Whatever turkish people or argentineans have the money to buy games at this point will pay the full exchange rate - or get an EU/US friend to buy the game for them. Especially if multiplayer. With the full erosion of purchasing power in a country your market shrinks to that country's elite. And the well connected few.

Vietnamese WHAT!?!?!

CIS - U.S. Dollar

I used one of those hacks where you could get three years of Xbox Game Pass for less than 100 USD. Once that runs out for me in 2025 I'm probably gonna be done with gaming for good except for whatever games I can pirate on my dilapidated laptop.

Minimum wage in Turkey recently increased to 17.000 lira per month, equal to 570 dollars. Starvation line is 15.000 liras per month for a four-person family in Ankara, poverty line for the same situation is 49.000 liras.(source) Tl;dr nobody gonna buy this. Even my friends who like to buy from Steam started to pirate more and more.

It's the same for the new Like a Dragon game. I assume they're trying to thwart people like me who use a VPN to buy games for cheaper.

I ended up buying a shared steam account via eBay for $12. Sellers buy the game and sell offline access to multiple people. You get login details, install the game and then put steam in offline mode and keep access to the game.

I feel like I’ve been left in the past with that Yen to USD conversion, like I swear back in 2009 when I lived there it was 1 dollar to 100 yen or even in the 90s. Then again game prices in Japan were always absurd at like 10k for a new AAA title.