Valve increases suggested prices for Steam Games non USD currencies | Commits to update non USD price suggestions annually

[AlTech]

Summary

Some background: Valve suggests prices to developers based on the USD price they want to set their product at. Devs are free to follow the suggested prices or use their own price on a per currency basis.

 

Games and Software on Steam by default use Steam's suggested pricing unless a dev chooses to override it for a currency.

 

Valve has updated their suggested prices for Steam Games priced in non USD Currencies for the first time since 2020 (which I believe is when Valve introduced Suggested Pricing in the first place but don't quote me on that).

 

The biggest "losers" of this change are the:

• Argentine Peso - Eyeballing the change numbers it seems to be between 400% and 500% more expensive per price point
• Turkish Lira - Similar to Argentine Peso but closer to 400% more expensive per price point
• Brazilean Real - About 40% to 50% more expensive per price point.

 

Steam games priced in GBP and EUR are also getting more expensive tho the EUR is seeing a bigger hit than the GBP.

 

For a full list of currency changes check the sources section for more details.

 

These price changes are expected to happen soon ish unless a game is on sale rn for the Halloween sale; in that case it'll be 28 days from the end of the sale for the new price to take effect.

 

Some currencies have not been changed at all:

Quote

Of all the changed currencies, the following have not been affected in any price point:

• CIS - U.S. Dollar
• Costa Rican Colon
• Israeli New Shekel
• Kuwaiti Dinar
• Singapore Dollar
• South Asia - USD
• U.A.E. Dirham

 

Quotes

Quote

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. 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. But in the case of games on Steam, we also drill down more specifically to entertainment purchasing to better inform those decisions.

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.

Many games choose to ignore our recommendations and determine their own pricing in each currency, and that’s just fine. But we hope the recommendations are a useful data point for developers who don’t have the time or interest to research pricing in each currency themselves.

 

My thoughts

Seems reasonable if the currencies have changed in value or purchasing power has changed that Valve would suggest new prices.

 

Sources

https://steamdb.info/blog/valve-price-matrix-2022-update/

[ZetZet]

Key resellers will get more money.  I still don't understand how the legality of those sites works. There were whispers that they are shady, but then nothing is happening in terms of shutting them down. 

[CTR640]

4 minutes ago, ZetZet said:

Key resellers will get more money.  I still don't understand how the legality of those sites works. There were whispers that they are shady, but then nothing is happening in terms of shutting them down. 

I don't care how shady they are but I'm not paying full prices to corrporate-greed. They treat us like trash anyway so why fill their bankaccounts more.

[ZetZet]

3 minutes ago, CTR640 said:

I don't care how shady they are but I'm not paying full prices to corrporate-greed. They treat us like trash anyway so why fill their bankaccounts more.

I feel like if corporations had standing they would have nuked those sites already. So maybe they can't do anything about it. 

[CTR640]

5 minutes ago, ZetZet said:

I feel like if corporations had standing they would have nuked those sites already. So maybe they can't do anything about it. 

Bad for them, good for us. Those sites probably knows something in the laws or they made sure they got everything required so the corporations can't do shit about it.

[Guest]

12 minutes ago, CTR640 said:

I don't care how shady they are but I'm not paying full prices to corrporate-greed. They treat us like trash anyway so why fill their bankaccounts more.

As far as corporations go, Valve/Steam have afaik never done anything bad to the consumer.

[CTR640]

Just now, fpo said:

As far as corporations go, Valve/Steam have afaik never done anything bad to the consumer.

I know, I was talking about corporations in general so not about Valve/Steam.

[Dracarris]

Hm what 400% more, shit there goes my source of cheap Steam games.

 

Edit: 400% hike on Turkish Lira? That would make the Turkish shop around 25-30% more expensive than the Euro prices. That hardly can be right..

Edit2: Nvm most developers were already way above the old recommendation as otherwise games would've been 1/10th of the USD price after applying market exchange rate.

[Bombastinator]

Americans are doing a lot of complaining about inflation but it’s actually a lot worse elsewhere in the world

[Brooksie359]

3 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

Americans are doing a lot of complaining about inflation but it’s actually a lot worse elsewhere in the world

Oh I forgot that others having worse problems makes my problems go away. Oh wait that isn't how the world works and this just another crazy argument against people use when others talk about issues. Stop trying to make everything a contest of who has the worst problems and realize that this is super counterproductive 

[WildDagwood]

4 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

Americans are doing a lot of complaining about inflation but it’s actually a lot worse elsewhere in the world

I'm not American, but it's not cool to discount/belittle people's issues just because you perceive another to be worse. Not meant to be a blanket statement for everything, but suggesting "inflation is worse elsewhere so you shouldn't complain" is wrong.

[Quackers101]

8 hours ago, ZetZet said:

Key resellers will get more money.  I still don't understand how the legality of those sites works. There were whispers that they are shady, but then nothing is happening in terms of shutting them down. 

Because its a grey market, both illegal and legal content. Some being flaws in the design.

I think there was some tries at lawsuits or to disable the stolen keys, else dont remember. A lot of less legit key selling sites is in the shady business, that cost developers more than piracy which has been a long topic. I guess up the price on keys is also to prevent some mass buying from another region with a lower price then selling from a higher price. So in the end such buying will end up hurting those people that has a low income or compared to the USD value.

 

So instead of buying from those, piracy could be better for everyone or just buy the game normally.

8 hours ago, fpo said:

As far as corporations go, Valve/Steam have afaik never done anything bad to the consumer.

They have, maybe not on a massive scale and tries to have more option than less. Although in some areas it has becomed a bit less.

Then you have security, when opened the floodgate, you could download risky or malware content in their store, very unsure about the safety of the workshop (some games have more risky content than others).

[TetraSky]

Canadian prices going up 8% to 17% depending on the USD price... Geez. That's way over inflation, man...
$69.99USD games already were $79.99 CAD.... Now they will be $89.99CAD... 

I guess it's still technically under the USD conversion to CAD... But that's becoming prohibitively expensive for me as everything keeps going up and up and up... With our 15% sale taxes, a brand new game will cost me $103.50... Buying power keeps diminishing. 

 

The Turkish Lira and Argentine Peso going up 500% though. 

[Forbidden Wafer]

Considering BRL prices haven't really increased since 3 BRL/USD was a thing and we are currently at 5 BRL/USD... Pretty much expected.
 

[Bombastinator]

5 hours ago, Brooksie359 said:

Oh I forgot that others having worse problems makes my problems go away. Oh wait that isn't how the world works and this just another crazy argument against people use when others talk about issues. Stop trying to make everything a contest of who has the worst problems and realize that this is super counterproductive 

No it just means that it’s a world problem and not a national one like people seem to be trying to frame it, and they’ve been more protected rather than less protected.  

[Brooksie359]

6 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

No it just means that it’s a world problem and not a national one like people seem to be trying to frame it, and they’ve been more protected rather than less protected.  

I would say it's a greed problem more than anything else. Inflation is usually the result of prices increasing due to costs increasing yet you see price increases across the board by companies that try and say its because of Inflation yet they are seeing huge increases in profit due to them simply hiking up prices. I mean it's very convenient when you can simply blame the price increases as Inflation when in reality its just companies taking advantage of the situation. The sad part is when all the companies do this then it actually does start to result in Inflation when it would have been entirely preventable had companies not increased prices alot for no reason. Sure they likely would have to increase prices a little bit to cover increasing costs but not nearly as high as they did. 

[Brooksie359]

7 hours ago, TetraSky said:

Canadian prices going up 8% to 17% depending on the USD price... Geez. That's way over inflation, man...
$69.99USD games already were $79.99 CAD.... Now they will be $89.99CAD... 

I guess it's still technically under the USD conversion to CAD... But that's becoming prohibitively expensive for me as everything keeps going up and up and up... With our 15% sale taxes, a brand new game will cost me $103.50... Buying power keeps diminishing. 

 

The Turkish Lira and Argentine Peso going up 500% though. 

Honestly I hardly ever buy games for full price anymore and will usually wait for sales or I end up buying indie games and they are usually more fun than AAA games imo. Obviously there are alot of bad indie games but i think some of my favorite games of all time were for the most part indie games and not AAA games. 

[Bombastinator]

21 minutes ago, Brooksie359 said:

I would say it's a greed problem more than anything else. Inflation is usually the result of prices increasing due to costs increasing yet you see price increases across the board by companies that try and say its because of Inflation yet they are seeing huge increases in profit due to them simply hiking up prices. I mean it's very convenient when you can simply blame the price increases as Inflation when in reality its just companies taking advantage of the situation. The sad part is when all the companies do this then it actually does start to result in Inflation when it would have been entirely preventable had companies not increased prices alot for no reason. Sure they likely would have to increase prices a little bit to cover increasing costs but not nearly as high as they did. 

It’s world wide though.  And it’s more or less everything.  Supply and demand is a thing.  If one section of the supply chain was suddenly getting rich we’d hear about it.

[strajk-]

Quote

 

• Argentine Peso - Eyeballing the change numbers it seems to be between 400% and 500% more expensive per price point
• Turkish Lira - Similar to Argentine Peso but closer to 400% more expensive per price point

 

Well it is just a suggestion, if they follow through is another story, regardless, I will keep using my Steam Accounts from Argentina and Turkey to buy the games for cheap compared to how the pricing is with my Main Swiss accounts.
No way in hell am I paying 59'99-79'99 for a game...the price has been blowing up so much lately that soon it is cheaper to just play Golf IRL instead of buying multiple games per month...most of the times only Israel has more expensive prices than we do...

If I can still pay 50-95% less than originally intended for the Swiss market, then I'll take it.

[WereCat]

18 hours ago, CTR640 said:

I don't care how shady they are but I'm not paying full prices to corrporate-greed. They treat us like trash anyway so why fill their bankaccounts more.

Depends really. Some developers even said that they would rather you to pirate the game than to pay for a stolen key to a reseller (in regards to G2A at least). Some of those resellers though just sell keys from Humble Bundle which people did not claim or already had.

 

And to be fair. People that buy on these websites often have no idea. They just see the price being lower so they go an buy it even if the keys may have been stolen. I've had some of the keys I bought for dirt cheap and activated on Steam revoked and games removed as Steam found and struck down some of the stolen ones, that's when I realized it's not really worth it to spend any money on those websites.

 

Regarding corporate greed... well, those are these days just mostly Multiplayer games with your annual Battle Passes, Loot boxes, etc... people keep wasting money on those in such big amounts that price of the game barely matters vs the amount they spend in-game. It does not apply to everybody ofc.

[Doobeedoo]

Can't say I'm all too surprised. Though in general Europe prices for everything be it hardware is insane though, especially third world countries where I'm at. How something of MSRP can be 50-100% more of it, what. Also when I saw dollar rising and prices in Europe increasing way way more, complete robbery for many goods, at least where I am. Just gas alone is like 10x vs USA like wtf, gas there is basically free and cheaper than water.

But to be more back on topic, yeah I rarely buy AAA game, it really needs to be decent at least and that I enjoy it. You know also worth the price of AAA game, because 60€ or even 70€ may be now is quite a lot of money for someone from third world country vs say US. Just to scale, I doubt average american would pay 300-400$ for AAA game.

Man, even Blizzard increased price for next WoW expansion from €40 to €50 sadge.

[Dracarris]

13 hours ago, TetraSky said:

The Turkish Lira and Argentine Peso going up 500% though.

Keep in mind many studios already were WAY over the recommended prices before so the actual increase will be way smaller (I expect 10-25%)

[ThreePinkApples]

I was initially just looking at the percentage increase for NOK, expecting all games to now cost 40-60% more. But then I looked at the actual values and the new suggested price in NOK is more in line with what games have already been priced at for a while. So I guess no real change for most games.

[igormp]

20 hours ago, Forbidden Wafer said:

Considering BRL prices haven't really increased since 3 BRL/USD was a thing and we are currently at 5 BRL/USD... Pretty much expected.
 

However, it's not like the purchase power has increase by much since then, so my bet is that we're going to see less sales here in Brazil after this adjustment.

[Forbidden Wafer]

6 minutes ago, igormp said:

However, it's not like the purchase power has increase by much since then, so my bet is that we're going to see less sales here in Brazil after this adjustment.

It didn't, but they did hold the prices for a fairly long time. I remember Nintendo even reopened their BR store to sell at "lower prices" (exactly USD*exchange rate) when the dollar started to skyrocket (buying with an international credit card also had 6.38% IOF taxes + exchange rate hedge).