On July 14, 2022, the price of the game Factorio raised all over the world. Why? The price was stable almost all the time the game was in Early Access. It was $20.00 before April 17, 2018, then raised to $30.00 until July 14, 2022. On this day, according to SteamDB, the price raised almost in all countries excluding the USA. The cause may be simple: developers just want to get more money for the already stable high-quality game. But what is the problem with Russia?
If the price was raised x2 or x3 times in all other countries, in Russia it was raised by 10 times. Compare: before July 14, 2022, Factorio price was 520₽ (about 10$), and then 10,000₽ (about 180$).
It angered many Russian players that saw a political context in it due to recent developers’ post about Ukraine’s support. There were no official claims about it, but the Russian players perceived it this way and started a review-bombing of the game. The situation was fully overviewed by Russian, and then by international mass media. What happened next?
Several days after, the price for Russia was lowered to 1,000₽. Not a single comment was made from Chezh studio Wube Software about why they did it. Some Russian players state that it was a mistake and developers accidentally added an extra 0 to the number (10,000 > 1,000) and then corrected it. Others think that it was an unsuccessful political decision and the developers just decided to do a step back.
Then information start appearing on Russian social nets that one of the developers commented on the situation on an unofficial Russian site joyreactor. This developer is Ukrainian so he can write in the Russian language.
I absolutely agree, I suggested this, but I will add, that there is an essence to doing this, but there is no point in publicly declaring this, although I support such a decision (indicated by you), but we, as a company, have neither the strength nor the desire to fight negative PR which would come out as a result of a public statement.
c4rt, 15 jul 2022
I suggested just silently taking money and transferring it to help Ukraine (in any way comfortable for the company)
De facto negative PR came out anyway, as a result of the decision, but I won’t decide it, it didn’t work out that way, I suggested, I warned that there would be *, let them figure it out
c4rt is apparently Roman Dubrovka, a programmer working in Wube Software. You can see the team of developers here.
But no one knows if this profile on joyreactor really belongs to Roman or not, Of course, anyone can create a profile with such a nickname, but this one was created back in 2018 and had made no posts before actual events.
It’s all information known at this moment. There are still no official comments from Wube Software about the situation with price, so now everyone can only guess what actually happened.