Valve commit to updating Steam’s regional pricing more regularly
The company say they’re “keeping pace with economic changes over time”
Valve have updated their Steamworks documentation for developers with a commitment to refresh their suggestions for regional pricing more often. This change in frequency is an effort to reflect global and local economic conditions affecting regions. While the company reminds developers that they are free to set their own prices in different regions, Steam provides regional pricing suggestions based on the price of a game in US dollars. Those recommendations should be updated more regularly, Valve said.
Steam’s regional pricing recommendations are decided by a few different things. Although exchange rates are a factor, Valve also base their regional price recommendations on consumer price indexes, and what they call “purchasing power parity” between different countries. “All of these factors have driven us towards the commitment to refresh these price suggestions on a much more regular cadence,” Valve said, “so that we're keeping pace with economic changes over time.”
Of course, there’s also the issue of players changing their region on Steam to access reduced prices for the games they buy. Valve have adjusted things in recent years to make it harder to do this by limiting the number of times Steam users can change their country and insist on the use of a country-specific payment method. In 2021, Valve and five publishers were fined for breaching EU anti-trust rules by geo-blocking Steam keys in some European regions. Valve said they’d co-operated with that investigation, and disagreed with the fine.
You can read the full regional pricing information on Steamworks here.