Some regions saw price hike on Steam for Activision games few days after ABK Acquisition, including older titles (and HALO MCC)

[KeradSnake]

Summary

For some reason, few days after the ABK acquisition, Activision titles and at least one MS title (Halo Master Chief Collection) saw a price hike on Steam in some regions. First spotted in Argentina, then the price hike also applies for India, Turkey, Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and several other regions

 

list of the games affected:

- Every COD on Steam. Price change listed in the source and quote. Meanwhile:

• Black Ops III: $51 - $57, converted from Indonesian Rupiah pricing of 800K - 891K
• Modern Warfare 2019 and Black Ops Cold War: $52 - $57, converted from Indonesian Rupiah pricing of 800K - 891K

- Crash N. Sane Trilogy and Crash 4 (Price change listed in the source and quote)

- Spyro Reignited Trilogy (Price change listed in the source and quote)

- Sekiro (Price change listed in the source and quote)

- Both OG Prototype and Prototype 2 (Price change listed in the source and quote)

- HALO Master Chief Collection (11 bucks - 38 bucks, converted from Indonesian Rupiah pricing of 169K - 599K)

 

Quotes

Quote

(Winpoin, translated)

 

So, even though it is reported that Microsoft will bring Activision Blizzard games to Xbox Game Pass, this plan has to be postponed until next year, because according to the latest report confirmed directly by Xbox Boss, Phil Spencer, Xbox Game Pass will not feature any games from Activision Blizzard until next year. 2024, and with that how will Microsoft recover its investment? and make a profit? The answer of course is to increase prices on existing Microsoft and Activision Blizzard games. Regarding this matter, recently, this news has been quite hotly discussed among fans of games from Activision Blizzard, such as Call of Duty, where the price of this game has increased drastically in the last few hours, even the game Call of Duty Black Ops II which was released in 2012 . What should have been priced at 335.000 rupiah has now increased to almost the same as a new game, namely 891.000 rupiah. Amazing isn't it? This is almost double!

 

Apart from that, even Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, which was released in 2009, which initially had a price of 124.000 rupiah, has now increased to 299.000 rupiah, this is straight up robbery. [....]

 

Apart from that, it wasn't just games from Activision Blizzard that rose, official games from Microsoft such as Halo The Master Chief Collection also rose from 170.000 rupiah to 600.000 rupiah. The increase in this game has almost tripled and lucky are those who have bought this game before. It seems that this price increase is not only happening in the Indonesian region, because after we checked, several regions such as Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia and several other countries also saw price increases that were more or less the same.

Quote

(Fandomwire)

 

Several Activision titles have quietly received a price hike on Steam, Valve’s video game digital distribution service and storefront. Activision has not released any statement with regard to the reason behind the unexpected price hike for these games, but for now, the price increase is only seen on Steam. It’s also unclear whether the same price hike for these titles will be applied to the Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo console editions as well. Here are some of the affected titles with the price hike from yesterday:

 

• Call of Duty (2003), from $9 to $19
• Call of Duty 2, from $9 to $19
• Call of Duty: Black Ops, from $18 to $29
• Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, from $21 to $49
• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009), from $9 to $19
• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019), from $50 to $55
• Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, from $40 to $55
• Crash Bandicoot 4, from $55.50 to $66.50
• Spyro Reignited Trilogy, from $30 to $38
• Prototype, from $9 to $19
• Prototype 2, from $18 to $38

These price hikes have also applied to the DLC bundles for the games. The price hike has been reported in the regions of Brazil, Argentina, and Turkey so far, while other regions might also see a change in price over the coming days.

My thoughts

I... don't think this is a good way to recoup some of the money that you just spend for one mega giant AAA company. Just saying. And for anyone saying this is how they're going to announce these games in Game Pass, well... I don't even know anymore

 

Sources

 

 

https://winpoin.com/hot-imbas-akuisisi-game-microsoft-dan-activision-blizzard-di-steam-naik-harga/ 

https://fandomwire.com/activision-have-put-the-price-up-call-of-duty-games/

 

 

[RejZoR]

Call of Duty, the onl ygames that remain 60€ even after 5 years...

[KeradSnake]

1 hour ago, RejZoR said:

Call of Duty, the onl ygames that remain 60€ even after 5 years...

not every COD but yeah, that price increase is just brutal for what is already a 10+yo games, or even 20 like the original COD that at least had a bit OK-ish price for what it is

 

HALO MCC being 11 bucks (converted) in some regions was a big deal as well, so the fact that they also increased it all the way to 38 bucks for some reason is a massive bummer for everyone that are planning to buy the game this month

[jagdtigger]

What else did anyone expect? Its malwaresoft......

[porina]

There's always been regional variation in pricing on Steam, and it can be very significant. Without checking, I'm going to guess the list of countries mentioned were those who enjoyed lower pricing historically. This could be a move to bring them in line with more expensive parts of the world and they no longer get a massive discount.

[Kisai]

30 minutes ago, porina said:

There's always been regional variation in pricing on Steam, and it can be very significant. Without checking, I'm going to guess the list of countries mentioned were those who enjoyed lower pricing historically. This could be a move to bring them in line with more expensive parts of the world and they no longer get a massive discount.

I kinda doubt the sudden price changes were Microsoft.

 

When you have mergers, you aren't allowed to "talk to the merging company" to do things like this. If these prices went up, it was likely one of three scenarios:

1. They were planned to go up anyway, and the timing is a coincidence, by someone at Activision

2. There was a change by Steam in how FOREX works, consider that the Indonesian Rupiah has had a exchange steep drop off since April. So perhaps Steam had to narrow the exchange float for that country.

3. Valve may have changed information on about Activision internally and that took any discounts off.

 

Like it's strongly unlikely that Microsoft told Activision to do this. It's far more likely that people who work at Activision that were in charge of COD eSports decided to do this in advance to look good to save their jobs.

 

Who knows. We can only speculate. All that is for certain is that Microsoft is extremely unlikely to have had any say in anything Activision could do until the merger was complete. How do I know this? I've worked at two companies that had "merger" situations and pretty much "business as usual" until the merger was completed , and the company being acquired started  silo'ing the business units before hand so that when the acquiring company inevitably decides to axe staff redundancies, the "losing" departments  (eg Marketing, HR, Sales) can just be let go once it's clear who manages who.

 

 

[porina]

38 minutes ago, Kisai said:

I kinda doubt the sudden price changes were Microsoft.

I described a possible "why" it happened, but not "who" made it happen.

 

38 minutes ago, Kisai said:

When you have mergers, you aren't allowed to "talk to the merging company" to do things like this.

As I found out in previous employment, there is a difference between a merger and an acquisition, but that is picking at an unrelated point. I generally agree with the rest.

 

Forex isn't going to be the sole reason although it likely will be a contributing factor. Steam regional pricing seemed to have some factor for the buying power of the local currency.

[TVwazhere]

On 10/19/2023 at 6:23 AM, porina said:

There's always been regional variation in pricing on Steam, and it can be very significant. Without checking, I'm going to guess the list of countries mentioned were those who enjoyed lower pricing historically. This could be a move to bring them in line with more expensive parts of the world and they no longer get a massive discount.

To support this, this has not been limited to Microsoft. 

 

Many steam users could buy their games "cheaper" by buying a different regions game because it's relatively cheaper there than it is in their own countries currency (If you've ever seen a steam price chart you'll see a breakdown of prices by currency relative to your own)

 

Source

 

And they aren't the first Company to announce regional price changes.

 

Quote

"You might have been aware that price adjustments started taking place globally around July last year in order to avoid mass key purchasing at low prices. We initially did not want to increase our price as we felt like it was fair for everyone to be able to purchase their games at their regional price.

But we’ve recently been witnessing a surge of purchase in certain regions that were not reflected in terms of player count in those regions, meaning we were directly being hit by mass-key-purchase (from shady retailers).

We’re a small indie studio and Roboquest is the breadwinner for us. These low-purchase tactics are hurting both the game development and our ability to be making a living off our passion. As a result and after much consideration, we’re adjusting most of our regional prices.

It wasn’t a light decision to make and we delayed it as much as possible, but we can’t any longer.

We know it will be unfair for people in those regions and we’re sorry about this, but we hope you’ll understand our situation and why we have to take those actions. In the end, the retailers enabling the selling and the mass-purchasing of keys are responsible for this unhealthy situation. "
Source - Roboquest developers

 

So "Microsoft bad" generally yes, but this isn't one of those times where they're just being greedy.

[wanderingfool2]

On 10/19/2023 at 4:07 AM, Kisai said:

Who knows. We can only speculate. All that is for certain is that Microsoft is extremely unlikely to have had any say in anything Activision could do until the merger was complete. How do I know this? I've worked at two companies that had "merger" situations and pretty much "business as usual" until the merger was completed , and the company being acquired started  silo'ing the business units before hand so that when the acquiring company inevitably decides to axe staff redundancies, the "losing" departments  (eg Marketing, HR, Sales) can just be let go once it's clear who manages who.

From everything that I read, the closing date on the MS/Activision deal appears to have been executed on the 13th, although they had initially extended it to the 18th (when they thought that the review was going to take that long).

 

As a note as well, there can be a directive for actions when the acquisition is completed, like "once the close occurs pricing must fall in line with our US pricing, with no pricing based on regional affordability".  MS will know of things like pricing prior to the close.  It is potentially feasible that MS could have actually been the  puppet master behind this increase.

 

With that said, do I think it's MS  doing it?  No, but the main point you used of the deal not being completed doesn't ring true as they have now had 7 days since the close to push through any changes they want (and this would be a relatively easy one to make, as it's probably just a click of a button)

 

On 10/19/2023 at 4:07 AM, Kisai said:

There was a change by Steam in how FOREX works, consider that the Indonesian Rupiah has had a exchange steep drop off since April. So perhaps Steam had to narrow the exchange float for that country.

That would only explain up to a certain percentage.  The Indonesian Rupiah if you took as an example only decreased by about 15% at max in the last 5 years (from peak to current pricing), and the last 1 year 10% (but it also saw a sharp rise prior to the seep drop off you mentioned).  [Although the Turkish Lira is the only one where forex  does make sense...as it's dropped by 50% in the last year]

 

On 10/19/2023 at 4:07 AM, Kisai said:

Valve may have changed information on about Activision internally and that took any discounts off.

At least the prices I saw, discounts were not included in the price jump.

 

Black Ops 2 as an example, in Indonesian Rupiah increased 165% (or 2.65x).  That is none sale price

 

2 hours ago, TVwazhere said:

Many steam users could buy their games "cheaper" by buying a different regions game because it's relatively cheaper there than it is in their own countries currency (If you've ever seen a steam price chart you'll see a breakdown of prices by currency relative to your own)

This is actually where I have a problem with Steam.  For myself, if I were a developer I wouldn't want an user from the US to buy a game in like Brazil for cheaper when the user is clearly in the US.  There should be almost a "country of origin" linked to an account, and that is used until something like connecting with an IP from a different country for like an 1 week period or something.  That way it can keep games still affordable for less wealthy nations.

[Doobeedoo]

Bah CoD should've been free for a long time by now, insane it's top tier price, each year, for same, bad, game.

[Forbidden Wafer]

10 hours ago, wanderingfool2 said:

There should be almost a "country of origin" linked to an account, and that is used until something like connecting with an IP from a different country for like an 1 week period or something.  That way it can keep games still affordable for less wealthy nations.

I believe this does exist, because I had a hard time sending a game to an European friend, even though I had the European pricing in my wallet. Ended up sending gift cards. 

[Quackers101]

Its comical that broken malware games is now 2x the price for all of them, could understand if same price over all ecosystems... but double the price of already dying and broken games... is just beyond stupid. Even though there can be a big enough community for those games.

[KaitouX]

On 10/20/2023 at 12:15 PM, wanderingfool2 said:

This is actually where I have a problem with Steam.  For myself, if I were a developer I wouldn't want an user from the US to buy a game in like Brazil for cheaper when the user is clearly in the US.  There should be almost a "country of origin" linked to an account, and that is used until something like connecting with an IP from a different country for like an 1 week period or something.  That way it can keep games still affordable for less wealthy nations.

This has existed for quite some time now, and people that abuse regional pricing get banned when they get found. Like mentioned before, you can't even gift games easily if the region is different due to how it was abused in the past.

 

Some publishers are actually crazy when it comes to regional pricing, FC24 for example costs more in Brazil, Uruguay, Colombia, Costa Rica and Qatar than in the US, with South Asia price being equal to the US, which is 3 times the Valve recommended price for the region. The fact that someone in Norway or Australia can get that game for less than someone in Colombia or Brazil is absolutely crazy.

[Mark Kaine]

I love that they keep saying people buy from other regions for cheap.... that seems like a cop-out, you cant even do that under normal circumstances... need at least a vpn, and steam doesn't "allow" vpns... so you're telling me they cant detect vpns, yet they *know* something was bought out of region?

 

Sure, sure... 

[Mark Kaine]

On 10/21/2023 at 3:54 AM, Forbidden Wafer said:

I believe this does exist, because I had a hard time sending a game to an European friend, even though I had the European pricing in my wallet. Ended up sending gift cards. 

yes, it does, but it seems to depend on the actual price and not the region...

 

sometimes a friend from us tries to gift me something (eu) but usually they can't... sometimes it works though... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

[Quackers101]

yeah the gifting system on steam sucks. while it was maybe broken 10+ years ago. now its nothing, like can't I just pay the "full price" to then gift it? but I guess there might be some loopholes around it.