Steam stumbles on regional pricing | Opinion

24.11.2023 - 11:24 / gamesindustry.biz

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We've all become wearily accustomed to seeing rapidly rising prices in the past couple of years, and the games industry has been no exception to the worldwide trend of inflation.

The current generation of console hardware has even seen a mid-cycle price increase, rather than the once-customary gradual price drops designed to bring consoles within more and more consumers' price ranges.

Even against that backdrop, however, the sudden price hikes game consumers in Turkey and Argentina faced earlier this week were pretty shocking. Steam operator Valve switched its storefront in those countries from local currency pricing to US Dollar denominated pricing, and the result was large price leaps for a lot of games – mostly in the double-digit percentages, although PC Gamer found some major titles whose prices had leaped by hundreds or even thousands of percent.

The reason for this policy change is straightforward, on the face of it – the currencies of these two countries have been incredibly unstable, with their value against the dollar collapsing so fast in recent years that it's challenging for businesses to keep up with their local pricing.

Users are understandably upset, but the most egregious cases of huge price jumps are almost certainly down to oversight on the part of publishers; Valve gave them just a few weeks to adapt to the change, and the default behaviour for games that didn't set a new regional USD price appears to be to use the US price, which would be enormously expensive in those markets.

The storefront could probably have done a bit more work ahead of the switch to avoid headline-grabbing numbers like Stardew Valley's 2900% price hike, but it was somewhat inevitable that prices would rise overall when this change was made – and if those currencies continue to decline, as seems very likely, the effective Steam prices in local currency will continue to rise.

The balancing act over how to price games and other products in local markets with very different economic conditions is nothing new, of course, and while Turkey and Argentina are extreme examples due to their collapsing currency values, the issue of local pricing is thorny in many other countries too.

Even among developed countries, we've seen significant currency movements in recent years, largely driven by the rise in US interest rates as the country struggles to get inflation under control.

The Japanese Yen has lost about a third of its value against the dollar in the past couple of years, for example – which essentially means that games sold in Japan, which have maintained their Yen pricing as previously, are now producing about a third less dollar