Minimum wage per country.

So, let's assume a game with flat pricing of $10, and people working at minimum wage in different countries. Someone working in Greece has to work 2 hours to afford said game, someone working in Brazil has to work for 5 hours, someone working in the United Kingdom has to work 1 hour, someone working in Afghanistan has to work for 20 hours. The price is the same, the cost of the game is not. This is flat pricing.

Now, assume on the other hand that the game costs 2 hours at minimum wage. For Greece that would be $10.12, for Brazil it would be $3.96, for the United Kingdom it would be $19.66, for Afghanistan it would be $1.14. You claim that this pricing isn't fair.

Regional pricing can be fair, but so far I haven't seen a proper implementation of it. GOG has the best I've seen so far (for the customer), but it is far from perfect.

Graph source

And people should consider, that the "really poor countries" (however defined) usually have the biggest difference between rich and poor people and the ones that are able to buy games at all have way too much money there, while overall more people in "richer" countries may be able to afford a game but not out of the petty cash. This would actually be an argument for making higher prices for poorer countries, as silly as it seems.
Not that I'm advocating anything else than the same amount of dollars per game for everyone, I'll probably never do.

Too bad that there is no minimum wage in every country AND the basic living costs would eat up a very different percentage of it, so something like this would have to be calculated for every city (not nation) individually and is impossible anyway.
It would even make more sense cutting off the communist states from the world market and trying to even the odds in the rest of the world (which is happening very slowly anyway), but who really wants that? Not me.
Trying to regulate video game prices based on wild guesses will only result in further discrimination and isn't the way to change the world for sure.

Thanks, I'll get it on the list.

Gog seriously needs to implent separate new and coming soon lists cause its almoust impossible to see these new arrivals.

I could live with that. It's nearly impossible to make regional pricing fair (you would need hundreds of zones to make it even halfway right), but at least it would be better than the regional pricing we have now.

So I wouldn't yell "hooray" and I would still prefer flat-pricing, but I wouldn't boycot games with that kind of regional pricing (I already bought Halfway before I realized that it had regional pricing and I don't feel bad about it).

You are correct. I just point out that a flat $ price is not the same as a flat cost. Flat pricing isn't fair, regional pricing isn't fair. Regional pricing could potentially be the most fair one, but it would require quite a bit of work.

And since I didn't post it yet this month, equality vs equity. Which one is flat pricing and which one is regional pricing? And which of the two is the most fair one?

The question is: Fair for whom?
Sure, regional pricing with innumerable zones of about 50km in size (an effort that will never be made as we all know) would possibly be more "fair" than flat pricing for the customers, but not for the devs. Something like this could lead to devs having to move to countries where it's cheaper to live and produce. The only thing fair for the devs would be a price dependend on the development costs where they actually are and that results indeed in a flat pricing for the customers, just with high variations between companies. In this perspective, flat pricing is more fair, yes.

Only talking about excl. VAT here, I know that VAT will be dependend on the buyers location in 2015, but the differences there are not big at all.

Customer.

But you are also arguing that one should change the cost based on minimum wage on country, though country of development instead of country of purchase. So the developers should use the formula of "minimum wage * skilled labor factor * development time" to calculate cost, even though the minimum wage is different. Why shouldn't they just use a specific region one to make it "more fair"? Let's use the Afghanistan minimum wage for all developers and calculate costs with that wage.

That's certainly not what I meant with "flat".
Same price for each game for every customer is what I meant.
I don't want all gamedevs having to move to Afghanistan to be able to survive with the money they get for their games.
Imho it's totally ok if a game from France is more expensive than a game from India.

Why? Because the wages are different? So cost is different due to region?

Yep and this is related to the basic living and working costs of the devs who we all want to be able to make more games.
Cost difference due to the devs region, not the customers region, yes.

So, changing price based on where the game is created is fine, changing price based on where the game is bought isn't.

That's how globalisation works. Cheap Chinese goods underprice American-made ones in my country all the time. Sure, it leads to a shitty economy, but that's what the moneymakers at the top want.

If we had flat pricing, where a pair of Chinese jeans were require to cost roughly the same as a pair of American jeans, we wouldn't have lost so much of our manufacturing base. And yes, I'm aware that this is "protectionism", but frankly I think that's preferable to economic devastation and this global race to the bottom.

To be fair at that price the difference for pricing would not be that bad. I would possibly buy it if I would like the game and if I could afford it but still I would not feel good by buying it. It just does not feel right. Nothing personal against you or your game. These kind of pricing schemes just make schisms between people and are still antithema to what gog was before.

Also it would really interest me in which pocket you would put my country.

Nope, no changing at all.
Producing a game in an expensive country will make the game more expensive automatically, no need for further changes.
Selling it cheap to the Russian market and getting the difference in profit back from artificially higher than normal prices for all Europeans is mean.