Hi everyone,
I have just noticed that the costs of the new bundles are $49.99 and $79.99 for the US servers, and for some reason are EUR 49.99 and EUR79.99…
The really strange thing is that the USD and EUR do not trade for a 1:1 ratio. The ratio for the last year or so is 1USD = 0.9EUR
So basically blizzard steals ~10% additional costs from everyone that plays in EU regions…
Nice way to round up the income from the game.
Are sells so bad that they need o go that way?
It’s somewhat negligible.
In the scheme of things, they seem fair. And they only need it to look fair.
It’s also easier from a marketing standpoint. Instead of euros and dollars, they could just say 49.99 and 79.99.
Blizz won’t actually get those additional 10%. In fact, they get less money from sales in EU than in the US, because everything bought in the EU has “value added taxes” slapped on top of it, how much depends on the individual EU member country.
I live in germany, and our VAT is 19%, that means whenever someone buys the EUR 49.99 bundle, the german government gets EUR 9.50 and Blizz gets EUR 40.49, which is $45.48 at the moment.
This. And the average VAT in the EU is 20%, with some countries going as high as 25%.
Also, depending on state laws people in the US also pay VAT (or sales tax) on online purchases, but that is added on top of the displayed prices.
Winged, I was going to make the same point. If it is true then it is the USA customers being screwed, not the EU.
I wasn’t going to post first about it though because I don’t really know how it works.
US VAT/Sales Tax tends to be a lot lower than EU VAT with a quick search making 10% look like the top end. And some states have 0% VAT/Sales Tax.
So not all customers in the US pay as much as/more than EU customers.
Hi again,
Thanks for the info, I didnt think about the VAT thing.