By the way Steam added regional pricing in many countries today. For the first time ever we finally got acknowledged as a poor market. Games that are $60 are $35 here.
From u/fablegrimoire,
"Gamedev here. This is NOT normal. I suspect a bug happened on Valve’s side.
EDIT: checked our Steam email again: “If you do not add a USD price to these columns for your game before November 20th, we will default to the standard USD pricing you already have in Steamworks.”, seems like manual input was explicitly needed after all, but I’m not the only dev who missed it apparently.
Here’s a summary of what happened:
Last month, Steam notified all devs and publishers of the price change Steam automatically suggested prices for LATAM and MENA (mostly half the USA price) Through the Steam pricing tool, devs can manually override the suggestion with another price We manually lowered the price to our 2nd game, but let Steam decide for our 1st game ($12.49) Come today, and through Steamdb, we see that Steam did NOT apply its own suggested price for our 1st game. Instead it applied USA price (24.99). We still see the halved, Steam-suggested $12.49 price in our pricing tool.Game developers are now discovering this and are hurriedly manually changing the prices to make it fairer to LATAM and MENA regions. We just did that and are waiting for Valve to approve the change.
I promise that outside of AAA publishers like EA, almost no game developer wanted this to happen. We’re aware that this is counter-intuitive and we know it won’t help with sales (or our reputation) at all."
How’s capitalism treating you, Argentina? (Context: They just elected an an-cap)
Thanks to abusers from EU and US 🙏
Abusers downvoting lol
Uh no?
The goal, Valve said back in October, is to prevent game developers from having to constantly adjust their prices to keep up with the stunning volatility of the Turkish and Argentine currencies. Instead, they ought to be able to set a regionally appropriate price in USD and forget about it.
Thanks to terrible governance by Argentina and Turkey.
Thats an excuse. I don’t know about Argentina side but we had fair prices. Not too low, not too high.
Steam wasn’t giving a shit about Turkey before people abused or complained about it.
Also Dollar/Lira is in 1/28 rate for like 6 months. It wasn’t volatile as article says.
Do I care? Not anymore. I’ll either go with Epic or piracy unfortunately. I can’t pay $60/70 to a game when my salary is not even $400.
If the intent was to keep up with inflation in a way that maximizes local profits, pegging to the US dollar makes no sense. The games wont sell at this price in any appreciable number. Steam could have easily used other tools, like some dynamic pricing model, to maximize local profits. The only thing pegging to the US dollar does is combat key resales, as the comment you are replying to implies.
