https://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamworks/announcements/detail/3728476412305766958
The Steam store in Argentina and Turkey will start using USD, along with new regional prices for LATAM + MENA regions
I suspect piracy will become increasingly popular in these countries
At first when I saw the title, I thought this was done to stop people who VPN swap stores. The article however paints a different picture: Developers do not want Lira or Pesos since they are too unstable. Doesn't make sense to price a game at X Argentine Peso if next month X is now 30% less valuable. If you have too much inflation, no one wants your currency. Even the Argentine government or presidential candidates said something along the lines of wanting to swap to the USD too.
There's a running candidate that said that, but that's the same candidate that said so many crazy shit and lies. So, you can take it with a grain of salt. Even if that candidate won the upcoming elections, I hope that dissolving Argentina's central bank is not going to happen because of many reasons, but also because the country has a parliament... They shouldn't allow it.
Which wouldn't help much, because then they would depend on the dollar, the properties of which are developed for the US economy, not Argentina's. But for steam? Whatever, charge in dollars, it's easier.
turkish here, piracy is already a big thing for any kind of media/games here, but steam almost ended piracy for gaming. i've not pirated a game since like 4 years, but i suspect i'll go back to it after this change, i'd like to support the devs but i just can't afford it,sorry.
As someone from a developing country, I'm painfully aware of how most big publishers choose to ignore recommended prices and just go with a straight USD conversion most of the time so I can only hope this doesn't screw them even further.
I really wish it was viable for Valve to enforce a ceiling on suggested prices or something along those lines, it's about the only way I see that ever changing. Well, that, or everyone just becoming a full-time sailor, I suppose!
As a Turkish person this fucking sucks. I was a pirate anyway but guess I will never get to buy games
Forgive my ignorance, but what does it do to your experience practically speaking? Are the prices going up? Is it difficult to purchase things in USD because of having to convert currency?
The game prices are scaled to our "purchasing power" to some extent before the change, meaning they're still expensive but steam is making the games more affordable for us to some extent, the change to USD means the scaling is not up to steam, there is recommended prices and if companies abide to those some games might even get cheaper but big studios tend to not do that meaning we almost get games at the price of a cheaper gaming PC before our economy went to shit.
I hope they don't expect people to actually pay in usd and instead offer the conversion themselves. Because I can't imagine people maintaining usd credit cards just to purchase games from steam.
Otherwise, this could be a positive change as publishers can now set prices without the "what if the currency loses half its value tomorrow" insurance margin.
Edit: steamdb has a chart of the new regional pricing. It's 50% higher than the current one for tl and 150% higher for peso.
You can purchase in foreign currency with any international card, there's a bit of a fee though.
I mean... If the currency is that unstable... I would expect people doing that and having accounts with dollars or euros, saving money in a currency that moves more than a rollercoaster it's not great.
They have savings accounts in dollars or pinned to the dollar, not spending accounts. But looking it up it seems tl credit cards can pay in usd + maybe a conversion fee so I guess it wouldn't be such a deal breaker
It's understandable why they did this, but now on all those countries game piracy will start anew, people won't buy legally if they can't afford it
The prices are still regionalised, they're just in USD instead of the equivalent local currency
Please login to Steamworks to add your USD pricing for your game(s) in the new LATAM-USD and MENA-USD pricing section of the Price Management Tool before November 20th, 2023. 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.
Los precios de steam se están por ir a la recontra mierda.
Wow fuck them
6000 is the cost of a aaa game on sale = 5 usd, 80 dollars is almost half of a salary, no more original games I guess
Yeah idk why people are salt at steam. It should be fuck my government for not being able to run a economy and currency.
We are implementing this with two new pricing regions: LATAM-USD (which includes Argentina) and MENA-USD (which includes Turkey)
The prices will be denominated in USD. But unique to the region. Unless the developer is lazy and doesn't set a price for the newly created regions.
Depends on what price the developer chooses and how stable the exchange rate between USD & the local currency is. If the currency gets weaker and weaker compared to the dollar, then the real price that locals are paying will go up.
And, I'm pretty sure that local inflation rates are the primary driver of this change. So, yeah, games will likely get more expensive as inflation continues & developers don't constantly update the USD list price.
Yk I've always wodnered what starting a charity to donate computers to countries with the worst steam pricing would do for piracy
Meh idk. Heard everyone say piracy was going to increase after Netflix increased its prices. Well guess what, it may have a little (but I quite doubt it), but clearly not enough as it’s doing it again. They know what they’re doing.
This isn't a small increase in price, not for the Turkish. They're already struggling to get by.
This doesn't necessarily increase prices, if anything it makes it easier for publishers to offer games in these regions.
Relatively speaking, games already were practically free in those countries to begin with, so it's not like piracy would make a difference to the vendors.
You have completely misunderstood the premise of regional pricing. Games were "practically free" in these countries because the average income is much lower than in e.g the US or Western Europe. The augmentation in pricing means that many Turks and Argentinians can no longer afford AAA games.
What augmentation in pricing? Steam is only changing the currency of the transaction. The devs will set the regional price for Steam to use, like they've been doing all along. Assuming they continue using the recommended regional price, the overall price shouldn't change except for conversion fees.
The recommended regional pricing that steam has provided for these regions works out as more expensive than when the local currency was used
I was involved with an Indie game that was priced at roughly $15. It literally sold for 10 cents in those regions with Steam's recommended pricing, mainly due to the accelerating inflation, and within hours of release, 20% of the sales came from these regions because of people abusing VPN. The pricing was quickly adjusted before that percentage could grow any larger.
When people can just get a freshly released game at a 99.5% discount, you might as well not sell the game at all in those regions.
May all regional pricing end. I do not want to subsidize development costs for third world nations.
I'd rather force companies to not use third world labor so they stop suppressing our salaries and pushing down investment in first world labor productivity.
Do you really think they're going to make more revenue by making the pricing more than they're willing/able to pay?
Because if publishers did, they wouldn't offer regional pricing.
Oh I think they are making more revenue by charging the first world more, but I also think they shouldn't be able to get away with it.
"Making more revenue with negligible cost of distribution" and "we're subsidizing poor countries" are not compatible.
Yeah they are.
The game is being sold to the third world only exist because the first world is paying as much money as they are.
It's literally a scheme to extract more money out of people. It should be illegal to prevent people from the ability to use things like VPNs to get those cheaper prices opening up the market and ensuring the prices actually match supply and demand.
No, they are not.
The fact that they're making more net money from those regions than they otherwise would, by definition, makes it literally impossible for you to be subsidizing them. The alternative is not listing in those regions, not lowering prices for you. There is no theoretical world where you get a cheaper price in developed countries without regional pricing in lower income regions.
The alternative is not listing in those regions, not lowering prices for you
The alternative is marginally lower prices for the first world and higher prices for the third world as the prices become global instead of a massive grift which charges you based on how much money you're able to spend.
No, there's not even a theoretical possibility for that to happen. Lower priced regions are lower priced because there aren't a meaningful number of people in those regions able to pay first world prices.
Lowering the global revenue by whatever small amount those regions bring doesn't somehow incentivize publishers to lower revenue further by lowering prices in the first world. It makes no sense to think it does.
Wow. That's definitely a take.
I'm sure you'll be pleased to hear that you aren't subsidizing anything. Lower regional pricing in developing nations has absolutely no effect on the price in developing nations for games. There is no subsidizing because there aren't any costs to subsidize.
there aren’t any costs to subsidize.
Literally the entire development cost. Games don't appear for free. They are developed with the money you pay.
Regional pricing is basically saying that for some reason video games should cost more because you have more money to spend on them.
That's just asinine. Every other industry that tries it gets widely criticized for it. If you want to get more money out of people with more money, give them more stuff. Don't arbitrarily decide something costs more in one country than it doesn't another even though the distribution costs are identical and the development costs are identical between them.
Well... How do you think a price for a product is found in capitalism? You try to find the sweet spot between too cheap and too expensive. When you are cheap more people buy, if you are expensive less people buy. Therefore there is a sweet spot where you make the most money. This obviously is dependent on the people in the market and the money they have. Of course the game publisher can go to the poor people and say that they want 500 money for their stuff. But they don't have that, so they won't pay it because they literally can't.
Long story short, this is not subsidising, this is publishers extracting the most amount of money from that specific market. Its called capitalism. Love it or hate it.
And of course products cost different amount of money around the world. Every market is different.
How do you think a price for a product is found in capitalism
It should be priced on supply and demand. It should be priced based on companies like steam having no ability to control which country someone purchases from and everyone on the first world just using a VPN to jump borders and fix the cheapest country available.
Basically we just been a regulation making it illegal for companies like steam to deny people access to regional pricing. Then they will be forced to find a price point that matches supply with demand, instead of fleecing the first world for more money
You are aware that digital goods do not have a supply in the traditional sense, right? I can buy 500000000 copies of your data and you still will have more of it. Its not possible to apply supply and demand to digital goods because we have unlimited amounts of them.
And btw what you are saying is quite similar to what I described. The price is found via establishing the amount of money in the market and the willingness to spend. That kinda is a way of looking at the possibility of demand.
But anyway. The key difference, probably, is looking at who is aiming for what. The companies are looking at extracting maximum value for them. You seem to dislike that.
They have a supply. It's based on their cost to produce.
companies are looking at extracting maximum value for them. You seem to dislike that.
With artificial region locks that shouldn't exist. Open markets are better, and the bigger the market the better it is.