this post was submitted on 05 May 2024
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The accounts are so important that you're willing to lose sales in that many countries?!
While 177 countries sounds like a lot, it's not where the majority of players are. PSN operates in the top 15 countries by GDP and the top 4 by population.
Of course there's still the question of why they work in so few countries when literally none of their competitors (that I know of) have those limitations.
It's because it's a Japanese company. I'm not saying this out of racism but because they're known for being archaic in how they do certain things. Like game modding and work schedules. Their public transit is top fucking notch though.
..
I think the mistake was ever thinking that one company is "good" while the other is "bad". Companies are just different flavors of bad once they grow above a size of, well, once they are companies.
Only because we didn't know better when we were kids.
I've been to Japan a few times. Only Tokyo is super accurate with time. Go to any other Japanese city and it's no different from any other city in the world. Late trains. Buses that are 10 mins late or not even showing.
Can we kill this narrative that Japan is hyper efficient with public transportation?
That wasn't in response to my racist comment but in response to the archaic comment. They're as much archaic in procedure and bureaucracy as they are advanced in tech.
I heard Hitler invented the Volkswagen boat
some huge countries on that list, philippines, pakistan, nigeria, egypt
pretty embarassing
Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia too. Not exactly developing countries.
They are also EU countries. I am not even sure it's perfectly legal to sell stuff in the EU and not sell to residents of specific countries.
No harm no foul until somebody makes a report I guess.
It is very much not legal. The EU is a single market and goods (digital or not) must be able to move freely.
I am not sure whether they can get by saying "we sell to Latvians, just not in Latvia". I mean regional pricing is still a thing here. I'm too tired to look it up now.
No regional pricing in the EU. There were lawsuits over that a couple of years ago.
EDIT: To be more clear, developers could use regional pricing in the EU but Valve is not allowed to block someone from say Sweden from buying something from Poland.
That sounds nice! Do you know which lawsuits were that? I'm interested in reading up on that. How does that work with different VAT rates?
This is accurate. I work at a international company. We will tell a bunch of countries to go fuck themselves since combined, they make like 1% of sales.
I'm not saying it's right or wrong. I'm just saying it's a thing many companies do.
I have knowledge on mobile gaming, they do this too.
It doesn’t pay to manage some shitty off brand Android phone’s compatibility issues when your whole country spends less in a month than a half dozen midwestern moms in an evening on the game.
I don't doubt what you're saying, but you have to admit that this is terrible PR for them.
If the past thirty years of Sony history has anything to say... I'm sure they're doing this right now:
PSN (PlayStation Network) is available in 73 countries.
It was PSNow (PlayStation Now, their game steaming service) that was only in 19 countries. PSNow was merged into PlayStation Plus as the Premium level package, and is in 30 or so countries.
Strange then that they are now only listed in 18 countries.
That is definitely strange, but might be an overreaction by Valve and not done by Arrowhead.
Edit: Seems it was indeed done by Valve.
Strange then that they are now only listed in 18 countries.