Factorio price in Poland

[mojohellis]

It is actually a question to Devs but maybe the community knows the answer.
Why Factorio is so expensive in Poland?
I have the game for many many years so the problem does not affect me but according to SteamBD only Switzerland has a bit higher price for the game. Poland is definitely a country of wealthy people so why is it like that? Any idea?

[NineNine]

Are you asking about why is Steam charging different prices, or Wube? As far as I can tell, the price is the same for everybody at Wube's website.

[mojohellis]

Price on Steam. On Wube Website it is 32,42 Euro (might also be based on my location as the price is similar to steam; otherwise it would be more expensive than over 90percent of steam regions prices e.g. russia 12 euro, so whats the point).

[Loewchen]

This is default steam regional pricing, all games using it have the same order when converted back.

[NineNine]

You should buy it from Wube. It's less expensive, and Wube gets to keep more money. Steam doesn't do anything but take a cut of your money.

[Tertius]

Steam doesn't do anything but take a cut of your money.

That's simply not true. After you bought a game, steam provides the steam cloud for shared saves. It provides a one-click-install process and keeps the game up to date. It provides installers for decades - even long after the original game website is gone (that's one crucial Steam feature). It provides a forum and a community. An ingame web browser. Screen sharing with friends. It also provides the Workshop (not used by Factorio, but extremely valuable for some other games, for example Tabletop Simulator).

It's fine if you choose to not use all this, however it has value for many other players. Steam is the only game platform that's not just a shop whose service ends after purchase but provides really useful services for players. From all big players in the gaming industry, Steam is about the only one that has not become evil.

[mmmPI]

From all big players in the gaming industry, Steam is about the only one that has not become evil.

I disagree and will try to demonstrate that there exist reasons to call them "evil" (like the others) :

I remember when steam was nothing more than a loader/launcher for the counterstrike mod of half life. Valve said they wanted to make loading mods faster and less of trouble to update. But with time passing to me they clearly became the vilain of the story, the install is not a one click process, most of the game people buy on steam are followed by lengthy updates that are exploited to push advertisment and fake all year promotion, when it's not just broken piece of software that is directly advertised. As if the owner of a grocery store could just sell poison or perished food and blame the suppliers when facing upset customers while still taking a 30% cut.

Initially again Valve created steam to be "independant from their publisher" which can means a lot of thing, but to me now it is clear they wanted to make more money, not have more creative freedom given their behavior after getting this independance. At the time it was their narrative to criticize the cut the pulisher took on a videgame when there was very little service added, if you compare to the cut the bank takes it's usually much lower than 30% so why would a publisher or valve take more than 30% what else do they provide ? To me they have became that "publisher". It's not just Valve that is abusing the situation of being a platform, but they are nonetheless in my opinion. It makes every game roughly 50% more expensive if the person who actually made the game wants the same amount of money at the end for their living than if they were not taxed 30% even before they pay taxes just to be allowed in the marketplace. If it was a bank it would be called usury and be a sin in the religion mentionned on their money, which to me is quite an argument to use the term "evil" literally and not just "greedy".

To me it seem Valve is putting ressources into a platform that makes them rich when other people make successful game (or have any practices generating income) instead of trying to make games themselves because it's too much risk now that they have alternative source of income. When looking at the number of employee and the annual profit, and the often poor quality of answer made by robots or absence of curating for the products sold it's also clear to me that they could hire 10 times more personnal and still be a wealthy company while providing a way better service since that's what they do now. Their refund policy is an example where they show this evil in my opinion, because it's something pretty basic in places with strong consumer protection that if you buy something that you couldn't test and that doesn't work ; you can bring it back, this is a service you'd expect from a platform because that's their responsability to put in relation a customer and some products, that kind of stuff justify some of the 30% supposedly versus the lower cut from the other platform. They have the necessary scale to handle a few cases of bad product or bad customer and shield the others when it happens and make sure it doesn't happen often by curating the product they sell and prevent scam-game to be present. But no, that refund policy is not uniform , it is always the least consumer friendly allowed by the law and they fight hard against the writing of new laws that would limit their practices.

To me that's pretty similar to the old model of tobacco company or oil-company and climate intox which is arguably evil in the sense that it uses the sympathy generated by their product toward their brand to mislead their customers into thinking this brand has reciprocal feeling and have customers side with them in the opinion battle that is triggered by lobbyist when trying to influence law making that would allow informing customers of the extend of the practices of their favourite brand or curtail them.

At this point it may be useful to tell people that are unaware that steam was judged guilty of making advertisement toward children that abuse gambling regulations. Yeah loot boxes are gambling and if you take 30% you can't just turn a blind eye on the practices. Though in my opinion the case in Australia shows the preocupation of the direction is not the reputation of the company or the decency of their practices but instead practicing denial and attempting to avoid responsability, and make me conclude that places without strong consumer protections are more at risk of seeing their youth impoverished by something morally condemned in the place of origin of the company having those predatory practices. ( i'm only selling this to kids of countries where i couldn't lobby against it being banned ) type of mentality.

To me steam is only the place i'm forced to shop for some rare goods or sometimes the only place i'm legally allowed to play a multiplayer game. I like none of the services and i feel every update is forced upon me everytime i read what has been changed, almost as if those are a pretext to push more advertisment for their own hardware that i'm always reminded exist in situation where i shouldn't, like me playing a solo game i bought 10 years ago, they have managed to create some intermediate screen to display advertisment in the process. This is also some kind of evil i think.

Maybe long time ago they could claim they save the PC gaming vs console gaming, and people would believe the analysis, but it's going to be much harder to explain what they can bring to the mobile gaming industry towards which they repeatedly claim trying to invest as a market in their updates notes. It seem to me that they want to buy their way bigger without any care for the consumer of the product at this point it's just a big number and big money and much less about video game. In that regard they are to me an example of that meme who says you either die a hero or live long enough to become the vilain whereas they are hopefully many counter examples, Valve is not one of them to me.

Now for the regionnal pricing it's not entirely their fault, since it's easy to abuse and quite unfair not to have one they are put in a difficult position. I don't trust them to use the means to do police for the abuse without mistake, and i do not trust them to put enough ressources to implement the second one properly without neglect that would cause unfairness. For information, my current regionnal pricing of France show Factorio at 32.XX euros on steam and factorio website, where the Witcher 3 ( game from Poland) is at around 50 euros with all the expansions when not in sale on steam or Gog. It makes Factorio look like a "cheap" game for me , a very good deal. I don't know how the comparaison hold in other places though.

Edit: And i forgot to mention that time when they tried to take a cut on the workshop under the pretext of giving money to the creators

[mojohellis]

You should buy it from Wube. It's less expensive, and Wube gets to keep more money. Steam doesn't do anything but take a cut of your money.

@NineNine As I said - I have the game for many years now so the "problem" is not mine.

It is just that I recommended the game to my friend who wanted to buy something for his son's birthday. I got surprised when I saw the current price - as it is much higher than what I paid. And it was OK at that moment, because many years passed, lot of content has been added.
But then I compared the prices and what bothered me is that Polish price was almost the highest compared to prices in other countries and I found it not fair - as I mentioned, many of the countries are much wealthier than Poland, yet have smaller price for the game.
Beginning of the price list:

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[NineNine]

I understand, but I doubt that anybody at Wube has anything do to with how Steam prices their stuff. I doubt they can even legally talk about it. If you don't think it's "fair", then go ask Steam about it (and let us know what they say).

In the meantime, just send your friend to Wube's website! They'll get a fair price, and the good people at Wube will get 100% of the money. It's a win for everybody.

[aka13]

I understand, but I doubt that anybody at Wube has anything do to with how Steam prices their stuff. I doubt they can even legally talk about it. If you don't think it's "fair", then go ask Steam about it (and let us know what they say).

In the meantime, just send your friend to Wube's website! They'll get a fair price, and the good people at Wube will get 100% of the money. It's a win for everybody.

A developer can talk about it, and a developer can set regional prices. Steam has suggestions for the developer though.
Also, since by purchasing with steam you also get the non-steam version, from a consumer standpoint buying through steam makes more sense.

[NineNine]

Steam doesn't do anything but take a cut of your money.

That's simply not true. After you bought a game, steam provides the steam cloud for shared saves. It provides a one-click-install process and keeps the game up to date. It provides installers for decades - even long after the original game website is gone (that's one crucial Steam feature). It provides a forum and a community. An ingame web browser. Screen sharing with friends. It also provides the Workshop (not used by Factorio, but extremely valuable for some other games, for example Tabletop Simulator).

It's fine if you choose to not use all this, however it has value for many other players. Steam is the only game platform that's not just a shop whose service ends after purchase but provides really useful services for players. From all big players in the gaming industry, Steam is about the only one that has not become evil.

The way I see it is:
I download the program. I pay once. I "own" it forever. I can install it anywhere, anytime I want. I can run it anytime I want, without needing to be connected to the Internet to run it or access my saves. And, I can run it today without being tracked, monitored, recorded, and monetized.

[Qon]

Also, since by purchasing with steam you also get the non-steam version, from a consumer standpoint buying through steam makes more sense.

Buying through Factorio.com gets you a Steam key as well.

[aka13]

Also, since by purchasing with steam you also get the non-steam version, from a consumer standpoint buying through steam makes more sense.

Buying through Factorio.com gets you a Steam key as well.

Then the matter is resolved, I guess

[Tertius]

The only thing I'd like to add to the "Steam / evil" part is that you need to actually use Steam and observe its behavior and explore its features to judge them. Give it a chance. From what I read between the lines, some people flatly refuse use it and never got even one game from them, so they never know how Steam is really from the player's point of view. And some people mistake game and creator behavior for Steam behavior. Steam cannot repair what a game developer broke.

I didn't even mention their shop part as good: their shop isn't paid AAA title promotions only, instead its offerings are just a variety of new games of all kind you can filter by giving a huge amount of personal preferences. If you're bored and looking for some new game to play, chances are good the search system of Steam will yield you a variety of games matching and relevant to your preferences without clicking away all those irrelevant promotions. I don't know any other game shop that's that user friendly and tries to find a game the user wants to play, not the most expensive and hyped but never play beyond the opening screen.

[EustaceCS]

Steam doesn't do anything but take a cut of your money.

That's simply not true. After you bought a game, steam provides the steam cloud for shared saves. It provides a one-click-install process and keeps the game up to date. It provides installers for decades - even long after the original game website is gone (that's one crucial Steam feature). It provides a forum and a community. An ingame web browser. Screen sharing with friends. It also provides the Workshop (not used by Factorio, but extremely valuable for some other games, for example Tabletop Simulator).

Would you be so kind to also recite all the problems this illusionary "convenience" comes with?
Modern Win10 versions come with OneCloud which allows you to make cloud saves out of any saves from any games.
To install Factorio on Steam, you need to install Steam first, for starts. For pure stand-alone Factorio it's just "unzip and go".
Factorio has built-in auto updated which does not require Steam or anything.
"It provides installers for decades - even long after the original game website is gone" - how's that relevant to Factorio?
"It provides a forum and a community. An ingame web browser." - that unmoderated cesspool (Steam Community in general, didn't visited Factorio's SC yet)? Classy feature.
In-game browser - is it mandatory to play the game?
Screen sharing - is it mandatory or even useful to play the game, especially with Google Meet offering screen sharing without necessity to install Valve's bloatware?
"It also provides the Workshop (not used by Factorio" - my dude, are you serious?

Even in best case scenario Steam hogs no less than 1GB of RAM and some extra resources of other kinds.
Just to let you have... the game auto-update which is implemented in the game already, screen sharing players don't use and Steam Workshop the game doesn't use?
That's nuts.

[aka13]

To install Factorio on Steam, you need to install Steam first, for starts. For pure stand-alone Factorio it's just "unzip and go".

If your preferred way of using software is "unzip and go", you have very special interpretation of convenience
Also, onedrive offers only 5 gigs worth of storage, which will not be enough for factorio.

[EustaceCS]

To install Factorio on Steam, you need to install Steam first, for starts. For pure stand-alone Factorio it's just "unzip and go".

If your preferred way of using software is "unzip and go", you have very special interpretation of convenience

I do and I'm tired of pretending that I don't.
Running Factorio by simply running Factorio can't be slower (or less convenient) than running Steam then running Factorio through Steam.
Even in case of launching it from desktop shortcut.
Which, I believed, is quite obvious.

As of OneDrive's storage limit - do average player need more than 5GB to store saves for the very particular game about save sync in which that player cares?
Unsolicited convenience is the worst form of convenience.
If the player would need syncing - OS provides convenient means for doing so.
If the player have special needs which OS don't cover - I currently use pCloud with 10GB free limit. There are other widely accessible options useful for broader audience.
If 10GB is not enough - maybe it's a special case which shouldn't be handled platform-wide and shouldn't be enabled for each Tob, Rob and Bob using that platform? Users with such demands are usually able to take care of their needs on their own.

Long story short, give money to Wube.
Help develop the game, not the generic bloatware with features which you'll never use.

[mmmPI]

Steam to me is only helpful to give easy access to multiplayer server but they are not much involved in it it seems, i have not heard of steam ban or report of profanity/griefing being dealt with by them, it is the community that does it unlike in some other games which is probably for the best.

It's still nice to see many multiplayer games in the lobby when using the steam version.

"unzip and go" is much better than "register you email adress", "send phone number" "write the sms code" , "tell your friend you are playing a 14th hour of factorio again this day" , "get bombarbed with popup of internet old-friend-now-stranger that plays game you may buy on steam" . "see PrOMotIOn 96% off game only 14.99" for summer winter spring and halloween or something.

To me that's like going in a restaurant, and you say you want meal A, and the person tell you, if you take meal B too, you can get cheaper beer. So you say no thank you, and then this person send you sms to tell you when someone you know come in that restaurant and orders meal B, and also whenever you go to the restaurant, they ask you "are you gonna take meal B today for the beer promo? " even if you take meal A every day since 10 years, and when you open your box of meal A, there is some ads for the meal B inside sayng it taste much better and you get promo on the coffee. You know why they would do that and i think being annoyed at those practices is normal.

Imagine steam is a car seller, then you car will tell you oh look another model a little different of the same brand is in front of you, oh look your friend is using his [brand] car, oh look the person you work with 12 years ago has bought a new [brand] car, you would receive notifications with "hey there are 250 cars of your [brand] in a 1km radius around you".

Now of course it sound a bit ridiculous for a car, because you wont do a compulsory buying of a car, for most people, but for a 3€ DLC ? look your friend is playing with it right now x)

[computeraddict]

To install Factorio on Steam, you need to install Steam first, for starts. For pure stand-alone Factorio it's just "unzip and go".

If your preferred way of using software is "unzip and go", you have very special interpretation of convenience

I do and I'm tired of pretending that I don't.
Running Factorio by simply running Factorio can't be slower (or less convenient) than running Steam then running Factorio through Steam.
Even in case of launching it from desktop shortcut.
Which, I believed, is quite obvious.

As of OneDrive's storage limit - do average player need more than 5GB to store saves for the very particular game about save sync in which that player cares?
Unsolicited convenience is the worst form of convenience.
If the player would need syncing - OS provides convenient means for doing so.
If the player have special needs which OS don't cover - I currently use pCloud with 10GB free limit. There are other widely accessible options useful for broader audience.
If 10GB is not enough - maybe it's a special case which shouldn't be handled platform-wide and shouldn't be enabled for each Tob, Rob and Bob using that platform? Users with such demands are usually able to take care of their needs on their own.

Long story short, give money to Wube.
Help develop the game, not the generic bloatware with features which you'll never use.

You make a decent point that Steam doesn't offer anything unique if the only thing you care about is Factorio aside from the multiplayer "join friend's game/invite friend to game" convenience feature.

But it offers all of those things in one package. For every game on their platform. I've got 27 games in my Steam library with over 100 hours on them, and 210 others besides. Storing all the installers for that is worth the DRM which has, even in Steam's early days, never given me any unnecessary trouble. Plus the Steam account integration a lot of online-only games through Steam have, so I don't have to manage a dozen different accounts.

While it's possible to keep track of that many installers and make proper back ups of all of them, and keep up with downloading updates and patches, and keep track of the passwords I've used for this account or the other, and keep track of the license keys, and set up a service to back up my save games on all of them...

Why bother? There's a service that does all of that. Steam is massively convenient for both players and developers. The proof is in the wild success of Steam as a platform. You complain about the annoyance and "bloat" of Steam's social features... but you can just not use them. Steam's install is less than a GB before you start downloading games.

Steam is not for people who play a computer game. Steam is for people who play computer games.

[mmmPI]

Steam is not for people who play a computer game. Steam is for people who play computer games.

That could make a good advertising slogan , putting the quantity as an argument is like saying i'm the best platform because i'm the biggest platform. And you can see i'm a good platform due to how big of a platform i am.

I disagree with the way you spin it though, you can't really use steam to manage properly 237 instals of games and their back-up/updates, you have to turn them off otherwise everytime you launch steam means dowloading hours of updates and patches. And by design of course during such download you can browse the store.

However i think you are correct implying that steam isnt for people who play a single computer game, because that would also means that updating steam and waiting for it would be more frequent that upates for your only game.

About the (regionnal) price of games i found this page that seem to be steam's latest recommandation on pricing for devs from this article that commented a "recent price increase.

"Why factorio so expensive in Poland ?"

Regional Pricing Recommendations
Developers on Steam have control over their own prices, in every currency. But researching and determining ideal prices for dozens of different currencies can be a challenge for some developers.

As a service for helping you manage pricing across all our different currencies, Steam offers a recommendation for all other currencies, based on whatever USD price you choose. When you are entering your pricing for your game, you will notice Steam fill in a set of recommendations based on your selected USD price. You can use our recommendations for some, all, or none of the other currencies, as you see fit!

So, how does Valve determine those recommendations?

It's tempting to treat pricing as a simple problem of foreign exchange rates and tie each currency's price equivalency to the exchange rate. But that kind of strategy vastly oversimplifies the disparate economic circumstances from one territory to another. And while exchange rates do have macroeconomic consequences, they generally don't have short term impacts on an individual consumer's purchasing.

Rather than just pegging prices to foreign exchange rates, our process for price suggestions goes deeper into the nuts and bolts of what players pay for the goods and services in their lives. This includes metrics like purchasing-power parity and consumer price indexes, which help compare prices and costs more broadly across a bunch of different economic sectors. But in the case of games on Steam, we also drill down more specifically to entertainment purchasing to better inform those decisions.
All of these factors have driven us towards the commitment to refresh these price suggestions on a much more regular cadence, so that we're keeping pace with economic changes over time.

Many games choose to ignore our recommendations and determine their own pricing in each currency, and that’s just fine. But we hope the recommendations are a useful data point for developers who don’t have the time or interest to research pricing in each currency themselves.

It is just that I recommended the game to my friend who wanted to buy something for his son's birthday. I got surprised when I saw the current price - as it is much higher than what I paid. And it was OK at that moment, because many years passed, lot of content has been added.
But then I compared the prices and what bothered me is that Polish price was almost the highest compared to prices in other countries and I found it not fair - as I mentioned, many of the countries are much wealthier than Poland, yet have smaller price for the game.

Notice how all the eurozone have the same price and valve claims it's not just a currency's exchange rate thing, and boast that they actually care about the disparate economic circumstances from one territory to another ? To me that only make sense as a lie. It think it shows that the regionnal pricing decision is in fact a currency exchange rate thing.

At this point i consider 4 options (from least likely to most likely) :

1) Factorio dev put the game higher price in Poland for some reasons

2)Valve has unique economic data showing them Poland is now richer than Norway

3)Valve make a mistake in their thorough analysis of entertainment and power parity purchase

4)Valve does not conduct any kind of anaysis instead an unsupervised robot update the prices based on currency exchange rate and its only feedback is the amount of customer complaining simplified in a single digit.

Now of course the option 4) is worded quite negatively, but i think it's only fair to make up fo the level of marketing hyprocrisy used by the defendant and to me that is the case in most companies with more than a million customer per employee or something so i would pick option 4. With maybe a bit of option 3. But it's also possible that they have used an unsupervised robot to gather their economic data and it would give an option 2 somehow.