Please don't post this trash propaganda on lemmy.
this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2025
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Does Valve set the prices? I thought it was the publishers/developers/who ever manages the steam product listing.
it's the devs/publishers yes
some time ago Palworld devs lowered the regional price for Poland as they noticed it was relatively more expensive for Poles to buy the game, they got a lot of praise for that
I think Poland is just in the crappy position of not being on developers/publishers radars and being lumped in with other nearby countries when it comes to pricing.
I've heard similar complaints of polish people for all sorts of platforms, not only steam.
And I think them not having the euro probably adds to the situation since the value of the polish zloty has been going up compared to the euro.
So if publishers set the price to the euro equivalent in 2022, and the Zloty rose by 20% compared to the Euro in the mean time, you end up with the prices that are there now.
The difference to the USD over the same time is even more stark at 36%.
"bawww I come from a rich country and wanna pay less"
All I hear from this trash
YouTube charges ≈$1.50 USD in some countries and charges $14 USD in the United States. I just thought this was standard. Shitty, but normal.
I think what is talked about is coutries like Poland where the currency is weaker than the $ but they still cave to pay more.
Having to pay less when earning less is good but paying more while earning less is bad.
And the problem with at least poland exists now for a few years
Edit: i should have first read the article. And ut was indeed about poland where they pay (converted) like 100 for a 70$ game while earning less
Steam pushing Poland towards the eurozone, wasn't expecting that one tbh
we still wouldn't get paid more if we converted to Euros, we'd just be paid in smaller looking numbers
Not immediately, anyway.
The Polish price includes 23% VAT, no?
That would mean a $70 game in the US costs $86.10 in Poland. Not $100. The math doesn‘t check out for a lot of games I think.
Yes, and it should probably be cheaper in Poland. But it's really 17% more expensive in this case, not 44% (or 30% as the article calculates).
Yeah I was curious where the 30% was originating when it looks like 45%
It's either +44% (from $70) or -31% (from $101). Percentages are weird...
Right. The increase is from ~$69, so it's +~45% more expensive. If it was a decrease from the $101 it would be ~31% cheaper.
While I get the underlying point, any schedule for changing prices is going to cause a proportional gap as well. Even changing annually will have points in time where purchasing power relative to the dollar changes.
Plus constantly changing would seem like they are trying to get more at certain times. Honestly there isn't a pricing scheme that involves the US dollar that isn't just converting local currency to dollars at the time of purchase and that is a whole can of worms too.
The whole thing is stupid anyway.
If I have a game that I'm selling for $30 that doesn't necessarily mean that I convert into the local currency and sell that game for $30 in Nigeria (I have no idea what currency they use in Nigeria).
I might not be able to sell the game for $30 in Nigeria because that might be 3 months of the annual income. But I don't want to totally give up on the Nigerian market so I sell the game for $5, that way at least I'm still selling the game for some money.
To be honest I would probably prefer not to be basin my game pricing on the US dollar anyway right now. It doesn't seem like the most stable currency. Not many never was anyway.
But it's the opposite in NZ and Aus, we pay more when converted back to USD while the spending power is much less.
Well if it's AZ, my game would probably have been banned.
Don't you guys have a VAT?
Sure, but people just set their VPN to Nigeria and bought their games for $5. This isn’t the cleanest solution, but they can’t just do what you said.
You a can also buy common university textbooks from India at a fraction of the price they sell for in the US. I say take your deals where you can get them!
According to my flatmate, it's already been a thing for some time
It’s been a thing since forever. There’s an industry revolving around regional pricing scalping, led by Kinguin, Eneba etc…
I don't really care what they do, I just want them to do ANYTHING. Either update the regional pricing more regularly or just get rid of the damned thing and let me pay in USD/EUR. There are some rare publishers that will actually go out of their way to manually set the regional pricing to make it reasonable but most of them just follow the default suggested Steam one leading to massively overpriced games. I'm Polish and at this point I only buy games on sales, the final price still often comes close to what the game would cost me in USD/EUR without any sale.
Edit: Valve themselves specifically says in their SteamWorks documentation on pricing for developers
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.
and yet the prices remain the exact same since they introduced the Regional Pricing Recommendations in 2022.
It seems like at least changing annually would be better than the current system.
cough Australia cough
In theory, this should make games "more accessible to a larger audience." But, as Water CS2 says, "The problem lies in the data Valve uses to make these suggestions." According to the YouTuber, Valve hasn't updated its conversion rates since 2022, when it first introduced the regional pricing system. At that point in time, "the Polish currency was near its weakest" – but Steam is still "using this weak old rate" from three years ago.
Fun side note: It’s Yannis Varoufakis, who would later become Greece Finance Minister during the turmoils, started the whole Regional Pricing (and the very first item marketplace with TF2) when he was Valve’s CFO.
Maybe I'm just misunderstanding the quote, but I'm pretty sure regional pricing have been around at least since 2010s.
Maybe I should RTFA