TaleSpire Dev Log 429 - Costs and Currencies
Hi folks, in this post, we’re gonna talk about various money matters, but let’s not bury the lede; we’ll start with seat pricing.
For the purpose of this post, we will use the USD prices as an example. The prices will then be regionalized for each country. This does NOT mean that the USD prices are just converted to local currency. See further down for info on what is actually done.
[h3]Seats[/h3]
The current cost of the full game is $25 USD.
We will be putting a build of TaleSpire on Steam called “TaleSpire - Guest Edition,” which will be free to download. For the purpose of this post, we will call the people using the guest edition “guests.”
For a guest to be able to enter a campaign, a seat must be available. The guest occupies the seat while they are playing, and they release it when they exit or return to the main menu.
Seats can be purchased by any person who owns the full game. Your seats are moved to whichever campaign you most recently played (or are playing), so there is very little to manage. Seats remain usable even if the owner is offline, so the adventure can continue even if someone can’t make a session. [0]
Seats will be sold in packs.
A one seat pack is $15 USD
A pack of four seats is $50 USD. Which is $12.50 USD per seat, or half the price of a full copy.
The guest edition has all the same tools as the full version, except the ability to create campaigns. Your guests can build and even GM if you want them to!
The real power of seats is that they are reusable across many campaigns, so once you have seats, they can be used for as many campaigns with guests as you like.
For you professional GMs out there, that means you only need as many seats as there are players in a single campaign. Your seats automatically move with you between campaigns so your customers never need to buy TaleSpire themselves.
[h3]Regional Pricing[/h3]
Steam actually explains regional pricing pretty well, so I’m gonna quote from their documentation:
The TLDR of the above is that the price of a burger in country A, converted to the currency of country B wouldn’t neccessarily be a sensible price for a burger there, as the value of things depends on a lot more than that.
When we put out the Early Access, we set the US price and then used Steam’s regional pricing suggestions to set the prices for the rest of us.
It’s been some years now and so at some point we probably should normalize the prices again to make sure they make sense for different regions. We’ve not got a plan for this yet though. We’ll post more as soon as do so that everyone is in the loop.
[h3]Argentina and Turkey[/h3]
Steam’s regional pricing has not been all sunshine and roses, though. Last November, Steam put out “New USD Pricing For Argentina and Turkey beginning November 20th”, which switched those countries to using USD citing “Exchange rate volatility” as the reason.
Understandably, this made the game impractically expensive for some folks. We quickly updated the prices to a recommended lower rate as suggested by Steam. However, we had hoped there would be more that we could do, but we haven’t found a way.
We’ll keep an eye on things and post again if we hear of any developments.
[h3]And that’s all for today[/h3]
Every day we are testing and bug fixing the seats system. Progress is good and we’re just eager to hit that point where it feels stable enough to ship to all of you.
More news on that coming soon!
Have a lovely week folks.
Disclaimer: This DevLog is from the perspective of one developer. So it doesn’t reflect everything going on with the team
[0] This post explains a little more of how seats behave.
For the purpose of this post, we will use the USD prices as an example. The prices will then be regionalized for each country. This does NOT mean that the USD prices are just converted to local currency. See further down for info on what is actually done.
[h3]Seats[/h3]
The current cost of the full game is $25 USD.
We will be putting a build of TaleSpire on Steam called “TaleSpire - Guest Edition,” which will be free to download. For the purpose of this post, we will call the people using the guest edition “guests.”
For a guest to be able to enter a campaign, a seat must be available. The guest occupies the seat while they are playing, and they release it when they exit or return to the main menu.
Seats can be purchased by any person who owns the full game. Your seats are moved to whichever campaign you most recently played (or are playing), so there is very little to manage. Seats remain usable even if the owner is offline, so the adventure can continue even if someone can’t make a session. [0]
Seats will be sold in packs.
A one seat pack is $15 USD
A pack of four seats is $50 USD. Which is $12.50 USD per seat, or half the price of a full copy.
The guest edition has all the same tools as the full version, except the ability to create campaigns. Your guests can build and even GM if you want them to!
The real power of seats is that they are reusable across many campaigns, so once you have seats, they can be used for as many campaigns with guests as you like.
For you professional GMs out there, that means you only need as many seats as there are players in a single campaign. Your seats automatically move with you between campaigns so your customers never need to buy TaleSpire themselves.
[h3]Regional Pricing[/h3]
Steam actually explains regional pricing pretty well, so I’m gonna quote from their documentation:
Originally posted by authorIt’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.
…
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.
The TLDR of the above is that the price of a burger in country A, converted to the currency of country B wouldn’t neccessarily be a sensible price for a burger there, as the value of things depends on a lot more than that.
When we put out the Early Access, we set the US price and then used Steam’s regional pricing suggestions to set the prices for the rest of us.
It’s been some years now and so at some point we probably should normalize the prices again to make sure they make sense for different regions. We’ve not got a plan for this yet though. We’ll post more as soon as do so that everyone is in the loop.
[h3]Argentina and Turkey[/h3]
Steam’s regional pricing has not been all sunshine and roses, though. Last November, Steam put out “New USD Pricing For Argentina and Turkey beginning November 20th”, which switched those countries to using USD citing “Exchange rate volatility” as the reason.
Understandably, this made the game impractically expensive for some folks. We quickly updated the prices to a recommended lower rate as suggested by Steam. However, we had hoped there would be more that we could do, but we haven’t found a way.
We’ll keep an eye on things and post again if we hear of any developments.
[h3]And that’s all for today[/h3]
Every day we are testing and bug fixing the seats system. Progress is good and we’re just eager to hit that point where it feels stable enough to ship to all of you.
More news on that coming soon!
Have a lovely week folks.
Disclaimer: This DevLog is from the perspective of one developer. So it doesn’t reflect everything going on with the team
[0] This post explains a little more of how seats behave.