this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2023
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'Today is the end of Steam': Argentina and Turkey floored by new Steam price hikes as high as 2900% (www.pcgamer.com)
submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 160 points 7 months ago (2 children)

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."

[–] mordack550 23 points 7 months ago

Thanks for the clarification! It wouldn't make sense for Valve to make a scummy move like this.

[–] Kyyrypyy 8 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Considering that Steam now requires for manual input for the prices for different regions, is there a tool that a) lists these regions and b) calculates the median suggested pricing for these regions in comparison to the region you (the developer) is based in?

I know an excel sheet would probably be a good start, but considering that therevare also developers in regions other than EU (€) and US ($), it would be a tremendous help to be able to input a price you have in mind, in your own currency, and have the prices calculated in other currencies in the respective regions.

[–] redeven 3 points 7 months ago

Steam's price settings page already has a very convenient Recommended Prices button that sets your game's price to what Valve estimates would be okay for that region. For most devs, that's perfectly adequate. Valve already did the homework so devs don't have to.

Publishers that would want to charge more would likely just set the USA price anyway and forgo regional pricing.

And if you want to charge less than the recommended price, while appreciated, why?

[–] [email protected] 33 points 7 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 7 months ago

Feels like any dev who wants to use the regional pricing will have more work now and before the change. This was probably done in favor of big publishers who treat the regional price as a small discount instead of a fair price.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago

Yea,Turkish person here, had to teach a few friends how to pirate