I have seen many reasons given by major publishers for the distribution of free content, but international currency discrepancies is a new one. Yet that’s what is happening with Civilization 6, with 2K announcing a whole range of new stuff that’s going to be given away free to owners of the game’s Digital Deluxe edition.
The argument was basically that people in many countries outside the US were not getting value for money with the pack vs. what it was providing when you considered what they were paying. As an example, the Digital Deluxe version’s RRP in the US is $US79.99 ($107.99), while in Australia it’s $US89.95 ($121.43).
Discussing the move, 2K say:
It’s important to us that wherever Civilization fans live around the world, that the Digital Deluxe edition provides a great value. We saw that prices with certain currencies didn’t live up to the savings we’re looking to deliver, and so we are excited to offer this new content at no additional charge to those who purchase, or already own, the Civilization VI Digital Deluxe edition.
That “new content” (the Digital Deluxe pack already included free access to initial post-release stuff) will be two Civ & Scenario packs released in “the coming months” that will add three more leaders to the game’s roster, with the new guys coming from “Africa and Southeast Asia”.
Comments
20 responses to “Civilization 6 Offers Free Stuff Because Of Currency Rip-Offs”
So when can we expect an Australian leader that takes a hard stance against their people being questionably ‘taxed’ for digital consumer goods?
Not until Civ 8 at least.
Yeah here’s a better idea – stop charging us in USD and maybe don’t have region locked keys. For fuck’s sake Valve/publishers, if you’re going to have a region specific store, at least charge in a local currency.
Look at Prey – $79.95 USD (around $109 AUD). You can go buy a console version for JB for much less than that.
Uh…PC version is also $59 at JB bud.
Uh… that’s not the point I was making bud.
Sure are a lot of snarky guests today.
Uh… whatever.
deleted
They’re offering extras now because the reviews for more or less every DLC pack are filled with complaints about the value of the deluxe edition from people all over the world.
The Deluxe edition was sold as “four post-launch DLC packs” for a “bundled discount” “*Save vs buying DLC packs a la carte” when in fact what the devs offered was a bunch of nickle and dime packs that barely broke even cost-wise in pretty much every currency.
The whole looming disaster was only saved from being an even worse deal when the devs bundled two civs into the most recent DLC pack instead of one and put a premium price on it.
Further, one of the DLCs was the craptastic Vikings Scenario Pack, which is almost completely useless if you never play anything other than the base game. Which by most accounts is pretty much eveybody. (There are a couple of throw aways wonders and city states as well, but seriously.)
edit: bloody hell. if you’re going to be put in moderation hell for fixing a couple of typos, why offer the option to edit a post at all?
It’s stupid. My posts often go through a few days of being moderated every couple of months and I’ve just completely given up bothering to edit.
Interestingly, as above, when I repost the corrected version with an extra sentence complaining about moderation, then edit the original post with “deleted”, the original post suddenly drops out of moderation hell.
It seems that the Kotaku moderation filter is somehow attuned to flag minor edits while letting significant edits through. Next time I might just add my moderation moan to the original post.
edited for typos
Interestingly, as above, when I repost the corrected version with an extra sentence complaining about moderation, then edit the original post with “deleted”, the original post suddenly drops out of moderation hell.
It seems that the Kotaku moderation filter is somehow attuned to flag minor edits while letting significant edits through. Next time I might just add my moderation moan to the original post.
inset random digits to get post out of moderation hell for correcting typos again blah blah blah blah
Hrm. I’ll have a look on Monday, but I do remember we had to clamp down on edits, because we had a spate of spanners who would post a perfectly benign post, then edit it with links to Viagra ads, etc. So unfortunately you don’t get free edits because other people were jerks.
There is no age attached to accounts? Surely if you have been here 12 months or more and not posting rubbish (check upvote ratio) you should be able to turn that off pretty safely.
Yes, there is. Unfortunately, that alone is not a useful safety metric, because we also had a spate of people with old accounts who came back to life, only to fire up the spam-machine (probably because they got infected with some trojan or something similar).
Every safety measure we have in place is because, at some stage, we had some issue with someone doing something they shouldn’t have been.
That really sucks 🙁
So they’re fixing a problem with international currency differences by giving the same extras to people no matter where in the world they bought it? How does that help?
Heh, glad I bought it thru Humble Bundle. Deluxe ended up costing me like $70 after discounts and such.
Regional price differences like this is why G2A is so popular.
And this is why i will continue to pirate the Civilization series. Any game 2K makes anyway.. They are money hungry whores.. you should see how bad it is for NBA2K17 players.