Steam has recently updated the developer documentation on pricing, saying that it will update regional pricing recommendations more frequently, and provide data to developers in a more real-time way to show the exchange rate of each country’s currency to set pricing.
As we all know, the pricing of Steam games will vary depending on the region, which also makes some countries a loophole for players to use VPN springboards to buy low-priced games, such as Ukraine or Argentina, and Valve continues to pass some The policy “repatriates” these players.
However, Steam pricing is ultimately determined by developers. Valve’s approach will first be based on the US dollar, and then display the suggested selling price in other regions according to the exchange rate and spending power of different regions, but according to Valve, most developers ignore it. This suggested feature, which caused the game price to fail to keep up with rapidly changing exchange rates (such as the Japanese yen).
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“As a service that helps you manage pricing in all of your different currencies, Steam will make suggestions for all other currencies based on the dollar price you choose. When you enter your game pricing, you’ll notice that Steam displays a set of dollar prices based on Advice. You can use this advice to choose part, all, or no pricing in any other currency as you see fit.”
Steam used to calculate different prices in different countries based on exchange rates and local prices. In the past, there was a “Horizon: Expect Dawn” pre-order on Steam, which attracted many players to go to Argentina to buy, because the price in Argentina is only 539.99 pesos (approximately NT$225), while in Taiwan it is priced at NT$698, and a similar situation also occurred in “Dianyu Renke 2077”.
In fact, it’s not just Steam, the Nintendo Switch eShop has the same situation. Mike Rose, the developer of the zoo simulation game “Zoo”, said that his game became a best-selling game in Swtich in September, and 85% of its consumers were from Argentina, because the local price of the game was only $1.50 in US dollars.
Let me tell you the story about how a little country called “Argentina” helped us to our biggest Nintendo Switch launch to date
I write “Argentina” in quotation marks because well… it wasn’t really Argentina, was it?
Time for another classic Nintendo eShop thread: pic.twitter.com/vsVrJ12R94
— Mike Rose (@RaveofRavendale) October 13, 2022
Valve emphasized that although regional pricing suggestions will be updated more frequently, there is no automatic scheduling function for developers to change prices. This announcement is only intended to help developers pay more attention to exchange rate changes data, so as to respond and propose price changes.