The other day I stumbled upon this article from the Penny-Arcade Report where the author explained to us what might be looming ahead of us in regards to companies tailoring cash shops to extort ever more money from us. It’s food for thoughts and I highly recommend you go read the article in question. To sum up, it seems some companies are thinking about displaying different prices to the user based on our buying habits.
Easy example, people in North America (more fortunate) pay more for DLC than people in more impoverished countries. By the way that is a real example. Many companies price their games differently based on where you love. Starcraft 2 for example costed around 60$ in the US, was going for less than 20$ in Asia and was even free in Korea. This is nothing new in itself…
What’s new is that there might be changes in price depending not on where you live but also your buying habits. Example, if you buy a lot of Cartel Packs, then the price of the Packs could be raised since EA knows you’ll be buying them anyway.
Some people will say that such a move would drive people away cause we would figure out what was going on and it would create customer backlash…. but companies can be creative when they need to. Let’s say an MMO drop boxes that you can loot but to open them you have to buy keys. Same prices for the keys for everyone so it’s fair right? But what if the rate at which the drop boxes dropped changed based on much keys you have bought in the past?
Instead of changing the price of item what if they made it so the more you spend the more opportunities to spend the game puts in front of you? Way more sneaky but it would have the same effect as rising the prices….
I’m not panicking yet… but it’s definitively something I’ll keep an eye on… food for thoughts…
If their methods became tailored too much to the individual they could find themselves facing a lawsuit, or worse, legislation.
People will put up with things like peak pricing and sales because those have some theoretical backing for keeping markets working efficiently. Extracting maximum wealth from each individual consumer does not make the market more efficient, it merely transfers wealth from those with high bargaining power, the companies, to those with low bargaining power, individual consumers.
Mmm, i don’t like the idea of that at all. Nothing new that companies trying to rattle more money out of their consumers, in good and less good ways but this would definitely fall into the latter category. I too will keep an eye on this, but as you point out, some things could be difficult to notice at first.