this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2023
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'Today is the end of Steam': Argentina and Turkey floored by new Steam price hikes as high as 2900% (www.pcgamer.com)
submitted 11 months ago by nanoUFO@sh.itjust.works to c/games@sh.itjust.works
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[–] pineapplelover@lemm.ee 160 points 11 months ago (3 children)

From u/fablegrimoire,

"Gamedev here. This is NOT normal. I suspect a bug happened on Valve's side.

EDIT: checked our Steam email again: "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.", seems like manual input was explicitly needed after all, but I'm not the only dev who missed it apparently.

Here's a summary of what happened:

Last month, Steam notified all devs and publishers of the price change
Steam automatically suggested prices for LATAM and MENA (mostly half the USA price)
Through the Steam pricing tool, devs can manually override the suggestion with another price
We manually lowered the price to our 2nd game, but let Steam decide for our 1st game ($12.49)
Come today, and through Steamdb, we see that Steam did NOT apply its own suggested price for our 1st game. Instead it applied USA price (24.99). We still see the halved, Steam-suggested $12.49 price in our pricing tool.

Game developers are now discovering this and are hurriedly manually changing the prices to make it fairer to LATAM and MENA regions. We just did that and are waiting for Valve to approve the change.

I promise that outside of AAA publishers like EA, almost no game developer wanted this to happen. We're aware that this is counter-intuitive and we know it won't help with sales (or our reputation) at all."

[–] mordack550@lemmy.world 21 points 11 months ago

Thanks for the clarification! It wouldn't make sense for Valve to make a scummy move like this.

[–] Kyyrypyy@lemmy.world 7 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Considering that Steam now requires for manual input for the prices for different regions, is there a tool that a) lists these regions and b) calculates the median suggested pricing for these regions in comparison to the region you (the developer) is based in?

I know an excel sheet would probably be a good start, but considering that therevare also developers in regions other than EU (€) and US ($), it would be a tremendous help to be able to input a price you have in mind, in your own currency, and have the prices calculated in other currencies in the respective regions.

[–] redeven@lemmy.world 3 points 11 months ago

Steam's price settings page already has a very convenient Recommended Prices button that sets your game's price to what Valve estimates would be okay for that region. For most devs, that's perfectly adequate. Valve already did the homework so devs don't have to.

Publishers that would want to charge more would likely just set the USA price anyway and forgo regional pricing.

And if you want to charge less than the recommended price, while appreciated, why?

[–] CJOtheReal@ani.social 1 points 11 months ago

I think there are some excel sheets that can do that

[–] CJOtheReal@ani.social 1 points 11 months ago

I mean even if you didn't want that to happen its still nither your nor valves fault, valve needs to have company security, and dealing with money thats essentially worthless is a high risk for them, defaulting to USD prices was the only option for both countries to continue running the steam store at all there, otherwise they probably would have to shut it down there.