^{OBS: para assinar esta carta no final com o nome habbo, fale com iggy1 no hotel ou comente neste tópico}

Petition for price review on Habbo Origins Brasil / Portugal

The current prices for credits in the Habboshop for Habbo Hotel Origins in Portuguese are not reasonable.

Prices in Brazilian Reals (for Brasil) and in Euro (for Portugal) currently seem to represent a market exchange from the Global price in United States Dollars, which is not a suitable way to convert prices in this context.

The appropriate way to convert prices of the same good among local currencies worldwide is the Purchasing Power Parities as described by Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. Short description of PPP rom their website:

PPPs are the rates of currency conversion that equalize the purchasing power of different currencies by eliminating the differences in price levels between countries. In their simplest form, PPPs are simply price relatives that show the ratio of the prices in national currencies of the same good or service in different countries. PPPs are also calculated for product groups and for each of the various levels of aggregation up to and including GDP.

The calculation is undertaken in three stages. The first stage is at the product level, where price relatives are calculated for individual goods and services. A simple example would be a litre of Coca-Cola. If it costs 2.3 euros in France and 2.00$ in the United States then the PPP for Coca-Cola between France and the USA is 2.3/2.00, or 1.15. This means that for every dollar spent on a litre of Coca-Cola in the USA, 1.15 euros would have to be spent in France to obtain the same quantity and quality - or, in other words, the same volume - of Coca-Cola. (...)

For more in depth information of what is PPP and when it should be used, please refer to the OECD website linked below. There’s also a map that can help visualize in the world bank website.

Table showing proposed prices for Habbo Origins shop

This tables compares the current prices in the Habbo Origins shops with the suggested prices based on the aforementioned conversion system.

We believe that it would be more fair if such a conversion system is used to decide prices for Habbo Credits so we could have in the Portuguese speaking Habbo Hotel Origins closer to the same enjoyment and economy of the English speaking one.

This wouldn’t hurt sustainability for Sulake because people would still spend roughly the same amount, if not more, if prices were to match the reality of our countries. And it would encourage more people to make purchases, and the ones already doing it, to keep buying credits.

It also does not mean prices will be higher or lower. It's simply a better way to convert prices for the same good worldwide considering appropriate variables.

The current prices as they are cause a huge impact in Brazilians ability to spend in game credits, but we also included a suggestion for what prices for Portugal should be in the table.

We would also like to quote the Valve policy for regional game prices on Steam, a game distribution platform which sells the same games in many different countries:

It's tempting to treat pricing as a simple problem of foreign exchange rates and tie each currency's price equivalency to the exchange rate. But that kind of strategy vastly oversimplifies the disparate economic circumstances from one territory to another. And while exchange rates do have macroeconomic consequences, they generally don't have short term impacts on an individual consumer's purchasing.

Rather than just pegging prices to foreign exchange rates, our process for price suggestions goes deeper into the nuts and bolts of what players pay for the goods and services in their lives. This includes metrics like purchasing-power parity and consumer price indexes, which help compare prices and costs more broadly across a bunch of different economic sectors. But in the case of games on Steam, we also drill down more specifically to entertainment purchasing to better inform those decisions.

All of these factors have driven us towards the commitment to refresh these price suggestions on a much more regular cadence, so that we're keeping pace with economic changes over time.

This petition is signed by the following Habbos from origins.habbo.com.br:

Alto

Balco

belly123

Guima

iggy1

Karoline

LILO

marcos

Open

PabloRiddle

Pani

Rakut

Samuell

Shanel

Trax

victor-lok