Steam updates its regional pricing recommendations and Pricing Tools

Many players in different countries have been complaining about the unfair regional pricing of the games on Steam. While some countries enjoyed relatively low prices, some countries like Indonesia suffered from “unfair” regional pricing.

Steam offers games in 39 different currencies and the price set by publishers in USD gets translated to the regional pricing based on the exchange rate and old pricing recommendations of Steam.

With evolving currency exchange rates and purchasing power, regional pricing may become too expensive for the region too cheap. For example, a 40$ game in the US may not feel too expensive but the same game in India with a normal exchange would cost 3,330 INR which is expensive regionally.

The same goes for many counties like Indonesia, Japan, etc. To fix this problem, Steam has updated its recommendation. If a publisher doesn’t know how to fix regional pricing with base USD pricing, they can check Steam’s recommendation.

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Although, it should be noted that, this is not a compulsion and the publishers can decide to price their game however they want. With big publishers like PlayStation Studios and Activision, regional pricing will still remain high.

For a 60$ game, Steam recommends the game to be priced at ₹2,499 for India which is quite reasonable and even if a publisher wants to price it higher up to ₹3,000, it will still be reasonable.

Currently, most 60$ games are priced ₹3,500 to ₹4,000 in India. Steam says in its official document that

“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.”

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FAQ

Will Steam or Valve, change the pricing of the games?

No. Publishers, as usual, set their own prices on Steam. Unless developers actively submit and publish their new prices, existing rates will not change.

Is it compulsory to follow Steam’s new pricing policy?

It is absolutely in the publisher’s control on what price they want to fix. They can choose to follow the new recommendations or keep prices of their own.