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Price discrimination by PopCap Games
On a recommendation by ketsugi, I looked up PopCap Games' "Plants vs. Zombies" game, and was presented with this screen:
"Buy Now. Only S$19.95" (i.e. US$13.83 at current exchange rates)
Surprised that they bothered to price the game in Singapore dollars for me, and suspicious of the round figure, I then visited the site using a US IP:
"Buy Now. Only $19.95"
This was very sneaky of them, segmenting markets like this, so I tried out a few other IPs, and this is what I got:
Indian IP: "Buy Now. Only Rs 199.00" (S$6.08, or US$4.21)
"EU" IP: "Buy Now. Only €19.95" (S$40.21, or US$27.87) [Ed: It should read "€19,95"]
I tried some other countries (e.g. Indonesia, Russia), but got prices in US$, so maybe they don't price discriminate for all markets (or my IP wasn't recognised as coming from those countries).
Moral of the story: Pretend to be from India when you buy games from PopCap.
