ESO Upgrades through Twitch store - WTF pricing?!

baratron · May 2018

Something is very wrong with the pricing of ESO upgrades when bought through the Twitch store if you live outside the US.

After some discussion on the UESP Discord and Twitter, we've discovered that British people are getting quite thoroughly ripped off.

To cut a long story short, see the prices when I wasn't signed into Amazon Prime, so Twitch had no idea of my location.

And compare them to the prices when I borrowed my husband's Amazon Prime account. See the massive inflation.

Is Amazon doing the pound to dollar conversion the wrong way? Are they adding on postage costs for a digital upgrade? Who knows! It surely can't be VAT (sales tax) in the UK that's causing the problem, since we're charged significantly less on the official ESO website.

ESO Plus costs for British people on the ESO official website:

1 month - £8.99 (= US $11.99)
3 months - £23.97 (= US $31.97)
6 months - £41.94 ( = US $55.93)
Yes, these prices are substantially cheaper than the US prices, but that's because the pound is currently in the toilet due to political reasons.

Compare them, however, to what we in the UK are being asked to pay for ESO Plus through Twitch:
1 month - (US $17.99) = £13.49
3 months - (US $50.36) = £40.43
6 months - (US $93.53) = £70.12

You'll notice that the cost of a 3 month subscription through Twitch is almost identical to the cost of a 6 month subscription from the ESO site!

Why are British people being ripped off so badly? Does this apply to other non-US countries as well?

muh · May 2018

To my knowledge it affects every EU country.

The issue at hand is the way twitch handles pricing. They don't use regional prices, but the US price and add 20% VAT on top of it for people living in the EU.

US prices * VAT = Twitch price for EU
1 month - $14.99 * 1.2 = $17.99
3 month - $41.97 * 1.2 = $50.36
6 month - $77.94 * 1.2 = $93.53

So, regardless of currency exchange rates, twitch store is about 20% more expensive than Steam and ZOS.

baratron · May 2018

Ah... See, I'd noticed that 20% markup and wondered if it was VAT (value-added tax, or sales tax), but I wasn't sure whether all EU countries used the same rate of VAT. I've only heard confirmation that prices for UK players and Danish players are the US prices plus 20% - are you in a country other than the UK or Denmark?

If this is what's happening, then it is already a problem. The prices which EU players see on their local version of the official ESO website or when they purchase through Steam already include 20% VAT, of course. When these prices are lower than the US price even with our sales tax included, we're getting severely ripped-off by Twitch.

Now, I don't doubt that ZOS needs to change the exchange rates used on its official store. While the UK has wrecked its economy by going through Brexit, we're not that poor a country to need the deep discount that we get. However, regional pricing is very important for players in some countries whose currencies have low buying power. A friend in Asia pointed out to me yesterday how strange it is that Twitch sends you to http://amazon.com instead of your local version of Amazon.

Therefore, having Twitch use the US prices and adding local sales tax means that players outside the US are being ripped-off, and players in poorer countries are being doubly ripped-off since they aren't getting their usual discount.

Another player mentioned on Twitter how unfair this is for the US military, who while US citizens, are frequently deployed outside of the US.