A new Steam update aims to help developers more accurately price their games in worldwide currencies, hopefully getting rid of the sometimes huge disparities between game costs in the US and abroad.
Valve was previously in hot water after players increasingly started to realize that games were sometimes 20-30% more expensive in countries such as Poland or Argentina than in the United States due to Steam's wonky regional pricing system. The backlash prompted several developers, including Arc Raiders' Embark Studios and JRPG studio Nihon Falcom, to manually go back and adjust prices for local currencies. But Valve's making some big changes starting from now.
"With today's Steam update, we've made two improvements to Steam's pricing conversion data to help developers price games in 35 currencies and 4 region groups worldwide," Valve writes in its latest blog post, explaining that it's tweaked Steam's regional conversion data and added two new conversion methods for developers to choose from.
"Given that market conditions change over time, pricing data is periodically updated to help developers maintain an appropriate price for their products on Steam," the blog reads, so these "new values are live" right now.
Developers on Steam could always and still can manually set prices for their games for each region and currency, but Valve's now also giving devs three methods to help them with the process. There's a "simple currency exchange rate" method that prices games from USD to other currencies using available exchange rates.
Then there's something called the purchasing power conversion method, which uses "public data about the average purchasing power of customers within a given country and/or region," and a multi-variable conversion method that's built on "multiple data sources for each currency, "including local purchasing power, the expected cost of comparable entertainment goods, and exchange rate (this most closely matches the method that was previously presented in the pricing tool)."
"These conversion methods are intended to help developers make informed decisions about pricing and to choose the option that best fits their goals," Valve explains. "Some developers may choose to use a mix of methods for their games or manually set prices for one or more currencies."
