Valve has revealed changes in regards to regional pricing on Steam, which might make games more expensive for everyone. But that’s a big maybe.
First things first, Valve is not raising game prices themselves. Valve helps developers by giving recommendations for their prices for video games in different currencies. The developers don’t have to follow their recommendations, but of course, many developers will just go ahead and follow Valve’s lead as they have done the research for them.
Valve doesn’t just look at the currency exchange rates for these price recommendations here. They explain it this way:
“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.”
So, what’s actually changed? The recommended prices have all changed. In fact, they have all gone up to various amounts, from as low as 2 % for the Philippine peso ($ 1.99 changing from ₱ 69.95 to ₱ 71.49) to a staggering 424 % for the Turkish lira ($ 1.99 changing from ₺4,20 to ₺21,99).
These changes follow news that Steam has just hit a user peak with 30 million concurrent users online logging in last October 23, 2022. Obviously, both these high engagement numbers for Steam itself, and the decision to raise recommended prices for global currencies are consequences of the continuing pandemic, with the war in Ukraine and subsequent economic crisis all working together to make a more volatile market for games, ironically at a time when video games have been making more money than ever before.
If Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick’s prediction holds true, video games as an industry will continue to stay resilient and grow for the next two decades. Whether this means the business will continue to be good for all the game companies isn’t as certain. If video games are forced to raise in prices, the industry as a whole may become more reliant on whales, the way mobile gaming is. It may still be a profitable enterprise, but some game companies, and gamers themselves, may have to be left behind on the way.
Getting back to the Steam changes, if a developer does change their game prices in different regions, there will be a 28 day cooldown before they can place discounts on their game. Steam will also provide tools to make it easier to make those changes, including a window to make changes if the new prices were entered in error, and the ability to control the timing for the new prices.
It won’t immediately be apparent which regions, if any, will be immediately or eventually affected by these recommendations, but Valve plans to update with new price recommendations annually. Hopefully this will be enough to be reactive to the game markets.
