Hi AOE community! I am Franco from Argentina.
Firstly i wanna say sorry if my English is not good, i am from a Spanish country.
I was born in 2000s, i started playing aoe 2 since i was five years old and i never quit it. I am a casual player focused on campaign and entertainment, love to spent time doing stuff with bots.
So here i wanna say something about steam price, at least in my country. As we all may know, Argentina is suffering a huge economical crisis, leaving us to devalue our coin “peso”. Nowadays 1 dollar is like $100 pesos.
Recent government restrictions made buying something in dollars little hard cause it has added taxes. These taxes are:
-“Impuesto a la ganancia - RG AFIP N4815/2020” - 35%
-“Impuesto pais - RG AFIP N 4659/2020” - 8%
-“IVA servicio digital - RG AFIP N 4240*2018” - 21%
These make a total of 64% of the total value of the game. Now AOE 4 is $3000 pesos, with added taxes it would be $4920 pesos, in case you did not notice, that is a lot and i will try to explain.
In Argentina minimum salary is $24.408,00. The game with added taxes is $4920, that will be a 20% of an actual salary! Completely insane!
I compared it to USA where you have 1160 dollars as minimum salary and the game is 60 dollars. That is a 5% of minimum salary.
To conclude, i know the game is still “cheap” compared to USA price, but you have to evaluate in the economical context where you are trying to sell it, cheap or not is still a lot for ARG. If there are no taxes that could be a decent price. And please, if someone notices i am doing the analysis wrong please correct me as polite as you can.
I write these not to change the AOE 4 price to 100 pesos, but maybe a little if you understand the problem we are living here.
Thanks in advance,
Franco.