Steam price increase makes games way more expensive

Steam's latest update to its regional pricing recommendations has put one over on gamers who live anywhere outside of the United States, Costa Rica, Israel, Kuwait, Singapore, some areas in South Asia and the United Arab Emirates. That's also known as: the rest of the world.

"Developers on Steam have control over their own prices, in every currency. But researching and determining ideal prices for dozens of different currencies can be a challenge for some developers," explained Valve in the announcement. In short, the developer is able to choose the price of their game, but the regional pricing recommendation saves them the task of converting the price into the other 38 currencies that Steam allows, so the majority of developers are going to go for this option. "Rather than just pegging prices to foreign exchange rates, our process for price suggestions goes deeper into the nuts and bolts of what players pay for the goods and services in their lives," continued the company. "This includes metrics like purchasing-power parity and consumer price indexes, which help compare prices and costs more broadly across a bunch of different economic sectors."

In these changes, only the U.S. Dollar, Costa Rican Colon, Israeli New Shekel, Kuwaiti Dinar, Singapore Dollar, areas in South Asia that use the US Dollar, and United Arab Emirates Dirham have been unaffected. SteamDB has laid out all of the increases (and the lone decrease) in price points here, but we'll pull out a couple of examples at the $7.99 price point.

The British Pound rises by 16% to £6.69, the Euro climbs by 18% to 7,79€, the Brazilian Real surges by 60% to R$26,49, and the Argentinian Peso sees an increase of 491% to ARS$620,00. Indeed, the subreddit of Argentinian gamers has expressed its ire over the continued rise in prices in their country, making memes of Gabe Newell and theorising what Captcha would Steam use to discern whether or not the customer was Argentinian. "Milk this month was $10, how much do you estimate it will be next month?" suggested one with the possible answers "more expensive," "cheaper," or "same, why would the price change?"

Topics: Steam