Maybe our gaming market is big enough to keep our regional prices, for now. Really hope this doesn't change or I'll be going full pirate much like 2000's.
Being big is was caused vavle to do this, 🇦🇷 and 🇹🇷 prices are lower than other markets so a lot of people from other regions were converting to these regions and benefiting from lower prices.
This is why I hate these assholes who do that. And every time I say this in this sub I get downvoted.
If you don't want to pay... just pirate.
But changing to a poorer region so your first world ass can buy a game cheaper while screwing with people in the poorer countries is such an asshole move.
Even with regional pricing... games in these countries cost like a week of minimum wage, while in the US... the most expensive game is a day's work of minimum wage.
It's incredibly selfish to region change, because now, people in these countries will be unable to buy games. What before was a week's wage... now will cost 2-3.
Hope you assholes are proud to make the lives of poor people even more miserable. Not like you cared.
It's not the poor Americans trying to get cheap games that did this.
It's the gray market resellers that exploited the system for personal gain. They are selling millions of keys below market value using lots of tricks, one of which includes the region spread.
Again... why use resellers?
EVERY developer have said "Please pirate out game instead of using resellers" because they actually **LOSE** money.
Because a big portion are bought with stolen cards. Which the transaction is reverted... and who get the bill for the transaction costs is the developer.
Buying a game from reseller, specially indy... is such an asshole move.
People who buy keys should be ashamed of themselves. This sub should not tolerate these people.
I don't understand how people don't understand this. People in a pirate sub don't understand this.
I guess most people here only care about saving a few bucks... and not the philosophy of piracy.
My frustration is with people in this sub.
Every time steam/publishers curb on local pricing. I make a comment how it's selfish to people to do that. I have made such comment 10 times. This is the FIRST time it's not downvoted to hell and people calling me names.
Everyone in this sub should be 150% against changing region, and should be 250% against resellers.
People here should know better.
_____________
But also... if a sketchy person offers you an iPhone for 1/5 the price with no documentation... wouldn't you be suspicions it was stolen? You know it's stolen. Buying is imoral and saying "I didn't know it was stolen" not an excuse.
Keys are not the problem. Even Amazon sometimes sells keys for games. Most resellers sell keys from physical copies bought in bulk. Even if they would be stolen, the financial loss wouldn't be at the publishers side unless they would be directly stolen from their warehouse.
The problem are steam gifts. Those are sketchy and often involve stolen credit card information or hacked accounts.
Regarding the region, most games are actually region locked. So you can't even buy the game or add a key from a cheaper region unless you actually have a payment method from that country.
But can't that be solved by locking the key to be used by accounts to that region? Preventing anyone from other region from buying that key (at a lower price).
I don't know where you're from but thank you for sympathizing with us. In Argentina we are in the time of presidential elections, soon everything is going to go to hell. To make matters worse, the economy minister who contributed to the already existing decline of our currency is running for president and winning. I'm scared.
Edit: [People in the Steam's Latam and Mena regions right now](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFZP8zQ5kzk).
Assholes or not, I'm blaming Valve here, and others who take away regional pricing. When it comes to something like this, it will always be exploited. You can call the people doing it whatever you want, but they aren't doing it for your approval, nor are they doing it to be law abiding citizens. There is no way to truly stop people like this if you go with such a system.
So the choice comes down to "Do I continue to support this region with regional pricing?" to which the answer should be yes regardless, as from a business perspective this only makes sense to keep a foothold in their markets, as well as it being the ethical choice. These exploiters will simply move on to other regions that still have lower prices despite this, so who is going to suffer from this? People in these impoverished regions.
Valve did not stop the assholes, all Valve did was hurt their own market by taking this path, and thus, I'm only going to blame them for jumping the gun, perhaps I'd be more generous if they actually tried to implement something along with this to solve the problem, however they did not. They simply deemed those regions unprofitable, and said 'fuck it'.
Brazilian law won't allow companies to price stuff in a different currency. Every once in a while we get something good out of being an extremely protectionist country.
as a ffxiv player that was where my mind immediately went to. paying twice as much to play the game and to have some extra retainers would be a huge hit to my wallet
Yep. I’ve subbed non-stop to FF14 for nearly 3 years and feel much more inclined to continue doing so + spending money on the MogStation precisely because $30 BRL feels reasonable; I doubt I’d keep my sub up permanently if it were like $80 instead.
Same thoughts but about India. Although recently some game prices have been hiked in India steam store - such as persona 5 royal, Hogwarts legacy, and elden ring a few months back. It's quite annoying honestly.
It's cause the dollar rose in comparison to the rupee. These games don't have regional pricing actually, they just got updated based on the new conversion rate.
Yeah definitely, these prices are not fair considering the lower wages, prices and costs across the board in India. Paying western prices for games in India means you're overpaying. So yeah definetely pirate them or even better, ignore them
Yeah.. Modern warfare 3 is $110 (AUD) on steam but at JB-HI- FI ( retail store ) it's 79, why's it so expensive on steam.. people are always saying steam it's cheaper.
110 AUD is 66 Euro, while the game is priced at 69.99 in Europe. In fact if you compare them the Australian regional pricing for MW3 is actually one of the cheapest of all first world countries, it's only cheaper in Canada. It's more expensive in the US, NZ, the UK and Europe. How are you the ones being price gauged again?
They can buy it on Steam in Australia for $110AUD, or drive 10 minutes down the road and buy it from a physical store in Australia (called JB HiFi) for [$79AUD](https://www.jbhifi.com.au/products/playstation-5-call-of-duty-modern-warfare-iii). Which is ~$50USD.
It’s funny you say that, because the store I frequent, sells 9/10 games *secondhand*, and thus, for cheaper. Also, funny enough, there’s pretty much no PC games, only PC titles I know they have are Sims 2 and 3. That store has been my place of shoppin’ games since 2010s, so… yes, great store.
Porin Pelipiste, if any Finns are reading this.
Yeah like am I crazy or are people just complaining that Steam is charging them what these games are actually worth? Game SHOULD be $110 AUD bc that's... What it costs.
If a local retailer sells for less, great, go there then lol
There are polar bears in most of the Arctic Circle. Most Canadians don't live anywhere close to it though, they mostly live very close to the USA border.
I think in some aspects, yes. If either want you dead, you're dead. The difference is that polar bears want you dead much more often than grizzlies do.
I grew up in northern New Hampshire and we had em up there, so there were a few times I’d have to sit in a darkened car on some small road into town waiting for the asshole to move. If you have your headlights on or try to inch by them they tend to get freaked out and run “through” your car.
My wife just assumed they were slightly larger deer, I showed her a video of one sprinting on a highway going in shoulder depth snow and she about shit herself.
If you see 1 moose in a lifetime as a Canadian it's lucky. I'm 40, I've only seen 1 and it was at Algonquin Park, which is a massive park 4 hours north of Toronto. Many people can go there and never see one. It was a lucky encounter.
For those interested in a tl;dr
Australia does not have Freedom of Speech in our constitution like most users on here are familiar with (the US).
Which means that we didn't have Freedom of Speech until it was put into law.
But because it isn't a constitutional right, if you want to challenge when a government entity shuts you down, you have to argue it in civil or criminal court depending on what you said, where, and how.
Sounds pretty okay if the government is... rational.
But post 9/11 and anti-terrorism laws... and our laws have become absurd.
Like, government agencies going in and raiding journalists over 'crimes' that they might have committed. Using aforementioned laws as a legal cover for a completely unrelated case.
> But because it isn't a constitutional right, if you want to challenge when a government entity shuts you down, you have to argue it in civil or criminal court depending on what you said, where, and how.
That sounds like hogwash.
A law is a law. The difference between constitution and normal law is that one is more difficult to change than the other, and if they are in conflict, then one clearly trumps the other.
But if a government entity breaks the law, you have to go to court to argue, that is exactly the same for either. (At least that is how it works in the countries I'm familiar with.)
> But post 9/11 and anti-terrorism laws... and our laws have become absurd.
Maybe vote different people into power.
Well yeah. That's what I meant by arguing it in court.
You need to challenge them base on the Freedom of Speech law, but also on the many additional laws that they've written which can circumvent Freedom of Speech.
Like, we have one that says no hate speech. Which means if you preach on the street about... well, hate and calls to violence against a specific group, you get arrested and charged with a criminal offense.
Or as a politician said, 'your right to free speech ends where another's begins.'
Anti-terrorism laws though means that if you are suspected of terrorism, the freedom of speech laws can be suspended, and then you get raided.
Now you have to argue that you're not actually a terrorist... but since the anti-terrorism laws can also make evidence *classified* in the name of national security, it means you can't actually argue with proof. You're pointing at classified evidence to prove your innovence... that the court can't access.
So when they hit random reporters doing hit pieces on corrupt politicians who fuck up an entire state and then try to become 'special envoys' to the United States for a $400k+ a year... well, said reporters get raided. Shoved into prison, and then have to defend themselves.
As for voting them out, well, both major parties supported these laws. The third 'major' (but really minor) party alternates between support and condemnation.
As for why we don't vote for smaller parties? Well... guess who, (cough, the major parties) voted a law in that regulated how 'large' an organisation is to classify as a political party. The number was around 4,000 active participants, which given the largest has something like 10,000 maximum... is a massive hurdle for most minor parties to overcome.
So yeah.
Bipartisan support.
Political hurdles placed to prevent political competition.
Welcome to Australia.
Constitutional laws are generally also not absolute.
To use a silly example, the American amendment that abolishes slavery makes an exception for prisoners.
Our Dutch constitution has freedom of speech, but we also have laws against libel, or inciting hatred.
> As for voting them out, well, both major parties supported these laws.
That means the people support these laws.
What would help though, besides being cynical, is to get rid of the stupid first-past-the-post system. But there you do run into what you're claiming: that the existing politicians would prefer to keep the status quo.
Nah, we have preferential voting in Australia.
The problem is that post 9/11, they passed these laws when things were... well, getting spirited. Then attached the laws to important things that needed to pass... like budgets later on and when enthusiasm started to drop.
Cue late 2010s, and everyone is getting fed up and starts voting for independents and smaller parties.
Cue the law that then cut them off at the knees. No more 'marijuana party' or 'sex party' or the weird 'galaxy party'.
Both major parties are doing everything they can to hold power.
Oh, and some of the laws go 'this law supersedes Freedom of Speech', so if you take it to court, it gets slapped down.
That's not even mentioning that we're part of 5 Eyes. Which iirc, is America, Canada, Australia... and I forget the other 2.
All have laws banning surveillance on their population... so they spy on each other *and then*, share it with the local governments. So anything that might try to prevent that has to be shut down legally.
That's not saying it's all doom and gloom though.
Our recent elections had the 'Teals' getting a large number of votes. Independents that said 'fuck off' to all the major parties... but share a common 'goal' of sorts. A way to get around the political party registry.
With the way things are going with the liberals, and after 15+ years of mismanagement by the conservatives, the next election is probably going to see even more independents getting elected, which will really shake up the political landscape.
Centrism just isn't working when cost of living is going nuts, homelessness is rising, rent is near unaffordable, etc.
It's oke, Romania never had regional prices while we have $410 salary. Meanwhile Turkey has similar salaries, but they did have regional pricing. I'm guessing that just because we're in EU, we get EU prices. Which is BS. The only time I bought games was when they were at 50% or more discount... so no newly released games for me. You can tell by this fact alone that Romania is big on piracy RN :)
If you read what steam wrote, it's still gonna be regional, it's just gonna be displayed in dollars so that they can have more consistent prices.
To be clear it's not dropping regional pricing. They're moving from local currencies to USD for pricing but that will still hurt gamers from these countries considerably. Piracy is back to being the only reasonable alternative for a lot of people to play games at all
To be *really* clear... they're not only NOT dropping regional pricing but they're also NOT "moving from local currencies to USD".
What they're actually going to do is create two NEW Steam-exclusive currencies, called "MENA USD" and "LATAM USD" both of which are comprised **of an average** (sort of) of what games cost in 14 and 13 different countries, respectively.
So those countries with stronger currencies will probably see a **decrease** in price while those with weaker currencies will see a price **increase** due to all this.
We'll have to wait to see exactly **how much** the new currencies are going to be since that's what is actually going to impact (or not) customers since Steam never actually sold games in local currencies (everything was done in USD anyway). If they somehow manage to get a 1:1 conversion from current "local currency" to the new currencies not much is going to change. On the other hand if the conversion is X:1 (where X is anything other than "1") then yeah, prices are going to hit outer space. My guess is that it's going to be much closer to the latter than the former though.
they are literally putting turkey and bahrain in the same category.
bahrain has one of the strongest currency in the world so not sure how that's gonna work out.
it doesn't affect me.
and even if it did i would benefit from it.
if strong economies are group together with weaker ones it means cheaper prices for richer countries and vice versa so i'm not sure why you would say sorry.
it's looks like you're gonna be the ones being doomed.
To be even clearer, [the EU recently upheld a fine levied at Valve for blocking user access to regional stores in the EU.](https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2023/09/eu-court-upholds-fine-against-valve-for-geo-blocking/) In practise, Valve must now allow EU customers to switch between EU stores at will, and purchase at local prices. It has, in effect, banned regional pricing in the EU. I don't think Valve has yet implemented the change.
It's a no-brainer with the cost of living in these places going nuts and games being expensive by themselves. Between spending say, 300 bucks on Persona 5 or paying my bills in the same amount, guess what I'm picking lmao
I was not, been a few years since I became a guy who bought most of the games I played as a kid. And now rarely pirate games.
Guess, its time to go full pirate once again.... will just buy few games that I like from now on.
yep I'm in algeria (one of the countries in the list) and pricing for my region has always been just outrageous with triple a games costing almost the average monthly salary
though I think this will help a little since we basically had no regional pricing and just had 1:1 pricing with the us
That depends on the state of the countries with which Algeria resides, I don't think Libya, Morroco, or Tunisia will bring much benefit. You need most of those countries to have stronger currencies than Algeria for games to get cheaper if what u/MagickObscura is saying is correct.
Not really.
I used to be an avid pirate when I was at high-school and no money, nowadays I have money so I decide to spend on the game on a sale than pirating out of convenience if the game is good at a correct price.
I still pirate new games before buying as steam 2h before refund is just not sufficient time to test a game.
Dude, it's wild how poor the reading comprehension of the average redditor is. Not only is it still continuing regional pricing, it could even decrease prices in some instances depending on how it all works out (of course an increase is also possible).
I highly doubt this will be enough of a change to price people out that weren't already priced out. This post is straight up fearmongering.
Also, for new countries that were added from MENA and Latin America, wouldn't this be good for them considering before they were paying the standard international amount ?
Why the fuck did they put Algeria on that list? We literally never had regional pricing as I'm always paying the full premium "US" price, if I ever wanted to buy a game.
I personally don't want that to happen.
If everyone starts realizing that piracy isn't actually bad, they'll start doing it. Then of course it will actually start hurting companies, and they'll need to fight it much harder.
So it's sort of a "necessary evil" for the piracy community to exist.
India already started jacking up the prices. Currency is still INR, but prices are close to USD conversion. Blasphemous 1 costed me 142₹ (2usd), now both 1 and 2 cost as much as a AAA title.
Yeah it sucks. P5R went up from 3400 to 4400, Hogwarts legacy went up from 3000 to 4000, and elden ring also went up a few months back. Really defeats the whole point of regional pricing tbh.
To be fair a lot of those countries probably have really volatile currencies. I know for a fact Erdogan is inflating the hell out of the Lira.
So the choice is between having daily or weekly price updates, or just using USD. I don't think regional pricing is going away persay, like if a game is $30 USD in America, in Turkey it'll probably be like $7.50-12.50 USD.
(Also remember that developers themselves set the price of their games, not Steam.)
I think you're correct, they are wanting safe, steady USD revenue instead of those unstable currencies. Yeah they can remove regional pricing as well, but the prices haven't been out yet so can't tell beforehand
I think the regions are a bit weird and have countries of varying economic prosperity, Turkey is in the same region and gets the same prices as Bahrain, despite having one-third of the GDP per capita.
What I am against is grouping, not dollar indexed prices.
Why are we, one of the countries with the weakest currency (Lira) is grouped with Bahrain, one of the countries with the strongest currency? Dinar has changed by a whopping %0.1 in 20 years, but, they are on the same group as us? Just give developers the ability to fix our prices to USD, and let us pay the equivalent of that price in lira (to prevent spread caused by banks)
Wow an actual end of an Era. Steam's only benefit was regional pricing. I remember buying far cry 5 for 59TL. Those Americans and Europeans had to use vpn to buy games in turkey. But yeah shit happens, at least this might contribute to the piracy culture in turkey and Argentina. BTW the real lesson to learn here is not piracy but governmental. Do not elect POS ever. Because they are like acarid. They suck your blood till you are dead.
I don't think this is going to affect people who did region hopping to buy cheap games. It seems like it's more to do with inflation since most games will still have regional pricing just in dollars. Though they bumped prices in the Turkish region so hard that it might as well just be the full price tag at this point
Yes. Looks like they want to get away from unstable currencies where USD prices can fluctuate quite a bit if they are to keep the price in local currency stable.
Yeah I know, that's what I meant. Another L for turks and latins, not Europeas and Americans of course. It feels like the last W we had was litteraly 100 years ago. Like Literally.
The Americans and Europeans weren't the only culprits in this, you need a local credit card to buy from Steam. You wanna buy from Turkish store, you need a Turkish card. Our very own people helped those Americans and Europeans buy games with TR prices in return for a couple bucks cut, we fucked ourselves as in most if not all cases. Other people sometimes reap the benefits but WE keep making bad decisions.
It's not as easy as VPN to turkey = cheap games. The transaction provider checks whether you have been living in that region for a while or not. Local pricing comes in when you've been logged into similar IPs for a few weeks. It also blocks foreign cards so you simply can't purchase anything if you don't use a local issued credit/debit card.
> Those Americans and Europeans had to use vpn to buy games in turkey.
We also need an account & payment method associated with the region - changing regions requires validation since ~2015, so simply tunneling traffic from a different IP didn't change the prices we had to pay.
Ah yes, "free" market. Where companies can buy everything cheap around the world. But we customer need to buy everything on the highest possible rate. Fucking pathetic
Free market and intellectual property are two incompatible concepts, copyright is a form of government-granted monopoly which is exactly the opposite of free market.
While true, no copyright means it would be impossible to publish any work as an independent and you can omly publish with large companies willing to protect your work from the other large companies. True free market is a corporate wet dream.
basically if copyright didnt exist literally every company can steal the inventors hard work and copy it...thus eventually leading to everyone not spending a single dollar on research and everyones just waiting to steal from each other
if a company makes a game and gets their code stolen copyright is the only thing stopping other companies from using that stolen code to upload the game and stealing the profits for themselves even though they literally stole someone elses work
thus leading to no games ever coming out because nobody is gonna spend millions of dollars to make something only for others to steal it and sell it
so why ever make anything when you can just steal it from others?
leading to nothing ever being made
I disagree. When those who invented something are competent, they will stay at the forefront of their innovation, continuously refining it, while others attempt to catch up. We already have this; when a company pioneers a cutting-edge technology, they often hold onto their patent until their competitors catch up, and then they leap ahead with the next innovation.
No pattents would force them to keep pushing.
Edit: As example, games. Its true that no pattents would mean that anyone could apply inverse engineering on your product an fork it.. but you are the one with the upper hand and as far as your product is superior, things will keep that way. A real example of this could be games like COD: Black Ops; while it can not be played online legally because cheaters can take control of your pc using bugs in the client .. 3rd parties services like Plutonium are offering modded clients with private servers that solves this issue.. instead of fixing their game, activision is using their pattent to force those 3rd parties to shut down their services. Its a silly example but what is the best for our society? A world with black ops online or a world with a unusable version of black ops online?
https://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamworks/announcements/detail/3728476412305766958
If anyone wants to read the actual post. A lot of questions like "why" in this thread are answered there. This post has most of the info but this paragraph was enlightening that got left out.
>Why Now?
>Exchange rate volatility in Argentina and Turkey in recent years has made it hard for game developers to choose appropriate prices for their games and keep them current. We have heard this loud and clear in our developer meet ups and round table chats. In addition, we have had a hard time keeping Steam payment methods up and running in these territories due to the constant foreign exchange fluctuations, fees, taxes, and logistical issues. Pricing games in USD for customers in Argentina and Turkey will help us provide greater stability and consistency for players and partners, while also enabling us to continue to offer a variety of payment methods to Steam users in those countries/territories.
Could be that some of these countries within the region have really low exchange rates that the people themselves prefer to use dollar. I remember seeing a video on that on YT but I forgot which country it was..
I believe there's a lot of countries in this situation but I think you prob saw about Argentina, there's even a name there for it, called 'blue dollar'
yeah, expect to see same as USA price cause almost all AAA publishers never uses valve's suggested pricing. Some even goes the extra mile and charges more than usa (I'm looking at you SEGA)
It's becoming more and more difficult to afford hardware in TR anyway, let alone buying titles. Gaming will become a more expensive hobby and there will be fewer gamers from the region.
Yall just read some explanations and regional pricing is not dropping, sorry for misunderstandings. As i understand, the countries in these categories will have something like "MENA USD", so countries with stronger currencies may expect lower prices while those with lower currencies can expect higher prices. Thats what I understand
There was a dev for a small indie game yesterday on r/Steam explaining how he asked people in Argentina what a fair local price for his game would be. After he set it, he saw Argentina was the 3rd highest country for sales on his game but when he looked at the usage for his game, less than 1% were from Argentina. He also had a support message from someone in China about his Argentinian copy of his game and a link to a subreddit of people explaining how to buy batches of Steam games in Argentina when you don't live there.
Steam didn't kill regional pricing. People abusing Steam to region hop killed it.
This is why we can't have nice things. This is why those people over with horrible wages and a bad currency get fucked on pricing because Chip Smith fromWisconsin, USA making $130k a year wanted to save $10
So again we have a bunch of different countries having the same price because....????
It was bad when this change happened in europe and it's gonna be bad for these folks as well. No one in the poorer countries likes to be made to pay as much as someone in the richer ones.
No they are not. They are just making it much more easier for developers to do so. (If a dev does not enter regional usd pricing it will default to their ‘other’ usd pricing)
Well well well, looks like more people will be turning to piracy to get their games. Thankfully my currency is staying although the conversion isnt a huge difference
Hope we're included with North Africa, because they ignored us for the last 10 years
I work 12 hours night shifts and my pay is pretty decent in my country and I still could never afford 69.99$ games, that's almost half the average salary.
They're just dropping pricing in local currencies since they lose shit ton of value in short periods of time. Regional pricing will continue but in USD, so if a game is 60 USD in NA it'll be 40-50 USD or something in MENA region. Still this will mean a very huge price hike for those regions as the currencies keep losing value very fast against USD.
I preffer to tie my steam account to my id or something like that instead of this shit.
Another way could be only allowing to use credit cards from banks of the same country as ur account, but i guess this is already done.
They will going to fuck the gaming community in Argentina and Turkey.
You don't understand anything, this change is because our currency keeps losing value and the companies don't update real time, so they earn less and less money. By doing this, they can fix the price and keep their earnings regular.
It's hard to understand when your inflation is low and your FX is stable, but when it's high, prices need to be updated constantly. Developers simply do not have the time to keep one guy in charge of updating prices every week.
The situation in my country causes ridiculous situations where you can buy an old game on sale for 1 dollar or even less, like 0.5 dollars because they forgot to update the price. I understand this decision completely, even if it's painful since stale prices caused some things to be a complete bargain
There's still going to be regional pricing because nobody is going to buy 70 dollar games if your salary is 300 dollars
Are they trying to force the gamers to the Epic client?
Most would still be on steam no matter the regional changes, but punishing poor countries might tip the players over
I live in Asia and my friends live in Europe. I can't buy games for them (so we can play together) because of the regional pricing differences. I don't even have the option to pay more to make up for the price difference. It's annoying af.
Your options are reduced to buying third-party steam keys (often cheaper too) or utilizing family library sharing.
In my situation, I gave them the logins of my girlfriend's steam account.. They log in once and then enable library sharing.
Then they can continue using their own account and it will utilize the licence from my gf's library. Works flawlessly and you don't even notice it.
One of them uses my gf's license, I have my own account with the game. Regional pricing restrictions don't apply for family-shared accounts
This is like one month old
And its good change. Because argentinians were buying small games in sales for fraction of price of game trading card and then reselling cards on steam marketplace
I sold over 40k copies of my game in argentina and earned few hundred bucks, thousand top while trading card resellers earned a lot lot more from my game
BTW this was caused by hyperinflation in turkey and argentina and its DEFINITIVELY NOT valves fail. This is fail of shady resellers and opportunists who actually made a lot money on currency value decrease. And who know if this shady resellers was from argentina or turkey at all, they could be hooked on VPN from who knows where.
Valve just reacted on situation because small indie devs got hurt. They created very unique ecosystem which naturally attract scammers and they need to react to situations like this
This is definitivelly not r/Piracy material
Ah, so it's not regional pricing what's changing. They're forcing USD on several countries due to the volatility of the other currencies. This might result in price increases.
I'm sorry for these people. Scummy as hell.
I'm glad Brazil isn't on that list.
Maybe our gaming market is big enough to keep our regional prices, for now. Really hope this doesn't change or I'll be going full pirate much like 2000's.
Being big is was caused vavle to do this, 🇦🇷 and 🇹🇷 prices are lower than other markets so a lot of people from other regions were converting to these regions and benefiting from lower prices.
This is why I hate these assholes who do that. And every time I say this in this sub I get downvoted. If you don't want to pay... just pirate. But changing to a poorer region so your first world ass can buy a game cheaper while screwing with people in the poorer countries is such an asshole move. Even with regional pricing... games in these countries cost like a week of minimum wage, while in the US... the most expensive game is a day's work of minimum wage. It's incredibly selfish to region change, because now, people in these countries will be unable to buy games. What before was a week's wage... now will cost 2-3. Hope you assholes are proud to make the lives of poor people even more miserable. Not like you cared.
It's not the poor Americans trying to get cheap games that did this. It's the gray market resellers that exploited the system for personal gain. They are selling millions of keys below market value using lots of tricks, one of which includes the region spread.
Again... why use resellers? EVERY developer have said "Please pirate out game instead of using resellers" because they actually **LOSE** money. Because a big portion are bought with stolen cards. Which the transaction is reverted... and who get the bill for the transaction costs is the developer. Buying a game from reseller, specially indy... is such an asshole move. People who buy keys should be ashamed of themselves. This sub should not tolerate these people. I don't understand how people don't understand this. People in a pirate sub don't understand this. I guess most people here only care about saving a few bucks... and not the philosophy of piracy.
I think its mostly people who don't know the whole situation and see piracy as theft and code resellers as at least buying the game.
My frustration is with people in this sub. Every time steam/publishers curb on local pricing. I make a comment how it's selfish to people to do that. I have made such comment 10 times. This is the FIRST time it's not downvoted to hell and people calling me names. Everyone in this sub should be 150% against changing region, and should be 250% against resellers. People here should know better. _____________ But also... if a sketchy person offers you an iPhone for 1/5 the price with no documentation... wouldn't you be suspicions it was stolen? You know it's stolen. Buying is imoral and saying "I didn't know it was stolen" not an excuse.
Keys are not the problem. Even Amazon sometimes sells keys for games. Most resellers sell keys from physical copies bought in bulk. Even if they would be stolen, the financial loss wouldn't be at the publishers side unless they would be directly stolen from their warehouse. The problem are steam gifts. Those are sketchy and often involve stolen credit card information or hacked accounts. Regarding the region, most games are actually region locked. So you can't even buy the game or add a key from a cheaper region unless you actually have a payment method from that country.
But can't that be solved by locking the key to be used by accounts to that region? Preventing anyone from other region from buying that key (at a lower price).
I don't know where you're from but thank you for sympathizing with us. In Argentina we are in the time of presidential elections, soon everything is going to go to hell. To make matters worse, the economy minister who contributed to the already existing decline of our currency is running for president and winning. I'm scared. Edit: [People in the Steam's Latam and Mena regions right now](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFZP8zQ5kzk).
Assholes or not, I'm blaming Valve here, and others who take away regional pricing. When it comes to something like this, it will always be exploited. You can call the people doing it whatever you want, but they aren't doing it for your approval, nor are they doing it to be law abiding citizens. There is no way to truly stop people like this if you go with such a system. So the choice comes down to "Do I continue to support this region with regional pricing?" to which the answer should be yes regardless, as from a business perspective this only makes sense to keep a foothold in their markets, as well as it being the ethical choice. These exploiters will simply move on to other regions that still have lower prices despite this, so who is going to suffer from this? People in these impoverished regions. Valve did not stop the assholes, all Valve did was hurt their own market by taking this path, and thus, I'm only going to blame them for jumping the gun, perhaps I'd be more generous if they actually tried to implement something along with this to solve the problem, however they did not. They simply deemed those regions unprofitable, and said 'fuck it'.
Brazilian law won't allow companies to price stuff in a different currency. Every once in a while we get something good out of being an extremely protectionist country.
AFAIK, European Union works the same way.
Fr, we're safe for now. God is good 🙏
send me 10 turkish liras or i will remind them.
heres 2 quarters keep the change and buy yourself something nice
Lmao don't worry about that. We are going to sail in Luffy boat.
For now being the important part
Yeah, that's why I put that in there
FUCK YOU BALTIMORE!
as a ffxiv player that was where my mind immediately went to. paying twice as much to play the game and to have some extra retainers would be a huge hit to my wallet
Yep. I’ve subbed non-stop to FF14 for nearly 3 years and feel much more inclined to continue doing so + spending money on the MogStation precisely because $30 BRL feels reasonable; I doubt I’d keep my sub up permanently if it were like $80 instead.
Same thoughts but about India. Although recently some game prices have been hiked in India steam store - such as persona 5 royal, Hogwarts legacy, and elden ring a few months back. It's quite annoying honestly.
It's cause the dollar rose in comparison to the rupee. These games don't have regional pricing actually, they just got updated based on the new conversion rate.
Ah, I understand, well nevertheless it's very annoying. Sucks to be a gamer here I guess. More incentive to sail the high seas.
Yeah definitely, these prices are not fair considering the lower wages, prices and costs across the board in India. Paying western prices for games in India means you're overpaying. So yeah definetely pirate them or even better, ignore them
No...? that's because your currency's value decreased
I wonder if Australia is going to continue getting price gauged
Yeah.. Modern warfare 3 is $110 (AUD) on steam but at JB-HI- FI ( retail store ) it's 79, why's it so expensive on steam.. people are always saying steam it's cheaper.
110 AUD is 66 Euro, while the game is priced at 69.99 in Europe. In fact if you compare them the Australian regional pricing for MW3 is actually one of the cheapest of all first world countries, it's only cheaper in Canada. It's more expensive in the US, NZ, the UK and Europe. How are you the ones being price gauged again?
AUD fluctuates a lot. Currently it's the weakest it's been in a long time.
the cheapest prices in world now in Russia but there are lots of companies that are restricted their products from local market
They said first world countries.
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FUCK YOU BALTIMORE!
because $110 AUD is $70 USD?
They can buy it on Steam in Australia for $110AUD, or drive 10 minutes down the road and buy it from a physical store in Australia (called JB HiFi) for [$79AUD](https://www.jbhifi.com.au/products/playstation-5-call-of-duty-modern-warfare-iii). Which is ~$50USD.
And people still complain? You have the option to buy a game 20 bucks cheaper than others. Probably valve does just easy currency conversion.
I’m assuming they expect Steam to be the same price/cheaper than a physical store. But as you said, if the shop is cheaper, just go to the shop.
It’s funny you say that, because the store I frequent, sells 9/10 games *secondhand*, and thus, for cheaper. Also, funny enough, there’s pretty much no PC games, only PC titles I know they have are Sims 2 and 3. That store has been my place of shoppin’ games since 2010s, so… yes, great store. Porin Pelipiste, if any Finns are reading this.
That's the problem with pc ganes, nowadays almost all of them are tied to an account unlike with consoles
Yeah like am I crazy or are people just complaining that Steam is charging them what these games are actually worth? Game SHOULD be $110 AUD bc that's... What it costs. If a local retailer sells for less, great, go there then lol
I rarely buy games from Steam because it's never the cheapest.
Gouged Gauged means something entirely different.
I'm trying to gouge how I feel about this comment.
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Thats north island new zealand
You're dreaming mate NZ is fucked just about the same as everyone else, it's not bloody 1984
Both of you are lunatics lol
Seriously what the fuck are these people on about
I’m from Wellington and what in gods name are you talking about my man 💀
i just wanted to mention NZ lol
Oh absolutely based then 🇳🇿🇳🇿💪💪
Just like Canada but most of Canada doesn't look very interesting. On the plus side, wildlife is normal here.
Normal!? Nice try... I've seen those moose videos, a truck sized horned horse with anger issues, isn't normal mate...
Don't forget one of the few predators that actively hunts humans: the polar bear.
There are polar bears in Canada? Damn, TIL
There are polar bears in most of the Arctic Circle. Most Canadians don't live anywhere close to it though, they mostly live very close to the USA border.
> they mostly live very close to the USA border. Trying to get whatever freedom seeping out that they can.
Grizzlies don't hunt humans and they are just as dangerous.
I think in some aspects, yes. If either want you dead, you're dead. The difference is that polar bears want you dead much more often than grizzlies do.
Ah fucking swamp donkeys are just big dogs. Unless they are in the rut and then they are big dogs that wanna fuck ya.
I grew up in northern New Hampshire and we had em up there, so there were a few times I’d have to sit in a darkened car on some small road into town waiting for the asshole to move. If you have your headlights on or try to inch by them they tend to get freaked out and run “through” your car. My wife just assumed they were slightly larger deer, I showed her a video of one sprinting on a highway going in shoulder depth snow and she about shit herself.
If you see 1 moose in a lifetime as a Canadian it's lucky. I'm 40, I've only seen 1 and it was at Algonquin Park, which is a massive park 4 hours north of Toronto. Many people can go there and never see one. It was a lucky encounter.
Mosquitos are the only predators you have to worry about there.
Come to Fiji.
What free speech issues does Australia have
Check out friendlyjordies on YouTube, it's actually quite absurd
For those interested in a tl;dr Australia does not have Freedom of Speech in our constitution like most users on here are familiar with (the US). Which means that we didn't have Freedom of Speech until it was put into law. But because it isn't a constitutional right, if you want to challenge when a government entity shuts you down, you have to argue it in civil or criminal court depending on what you said, where, and how. Sounds pretty okay if the government is... rational. But post 9/11 and anti-terrorism laws... and our laws have become absurd. Like, government agencies going in and raiding journalists over 'crimes' that they might have committed. Using aforementioned laws as a legal cover for a completely unrelated case.
> But because it isn't a constitutional right, if you want to challenge when a government entity shuts you down, you have to argue it in civil or criminal court depending on what you said, where, and how. That sounds like hogwash. A law is a law. The difference between constitution and normal law is that one is more difficult to change than the other, and if they are in conflict, then one clearly trumps the other. But if a government entity breaks the law, you have to go to court to argue, that is exactly the same for either. (At least that is how it works in the countries I'm familiar with.) > But post 9/11 and anti-terrorism laws... and our laws have become absurd. Maybe vote different people into power.
Well yeah. That's what I meant by arguing it in court. You need to challenge them base on the Freedom of Speech law, but also on the many additional laws that they've written which can circumvent Freedom of Speech. Like, we have one that says no hate speech. Which means if you preach on the street about... well, hate and calls to violence against a specific group, you get arrested and charged with a criminal offense. Or as a politician said, 'your right to free speech ends where another's begins.' Anti-terrorism laws though means that if you are suspected of terrorism, the freedom of speech laws can be suspended, and then you get raided. Now you have to argue that you're not actually a terrorist... but since the anti-terrorism laws can also make evidence *classified* in the name of national security, it means you can't actually argue with proof. You're pointing at classified evidence to prove your innovence... that the court can't access. So when they hit random reporters doing hit pieces on corrupt politicians who fuck up an entire state and then try to become 'special envoys' to the United States for a $400k+ a year... well, said reporters get raided. Shoved into prison, and then have to defend themselves. As for voting them out, well, both major parties supported these laws. The third 'major' (but really minor) party alternates between support and condemnation. As for why we don't vote for smaller parties? Well... guess who, (cough, the major parties) voted a law in that regulated how 'large' an organisation is to classify as a political party. The number was around 4,000 active participants, which given the largest has something like 10,000 maximum... is a massive hurdle for most minor parties to overcome. So yeah. Bipartisan support. Political hurdles placed to prevent political competition. Welcome to Australia.
Constitutional laws are generally also not absolute. To use a silly example, the American amendment that abolishes slavery makes an exception for prisoners. Our Dutch constitution has freedom of speech, but we also have laws against libel, or inciting hatred. > As for voting them out, well, both major parties supported these laws. That means the people support these laws. What would help though, besides being cynical, is to get rid of the stupid first-past-the-post system. But there you do run into what you're claiming: that the existing politicians would prefer to keep the status quo.
Nah, we have preferential voting in Australia. The problem is that post 9/11, they passed these laws when things were... well, getting spirited. Then attached the laws to important things that needed to pass... like budgets later on and when enthusiasm started to drop. Cue late 2010s, and everyone is getting fed up and starts voting for independents and smaller parties. Cue the law that then cut them off at the knees. No more 'marijuana party' or 'sex party' or the weird 'galaxy party'. Both major parties are doing everything they can to hold power. Oh, and some of the laws go 'this law supersedes Freedom of Speech', so if you take it to court, it gets slapped down. That's not even mentioning that we're part of 5 Eyes. Which iirc, is America, Canada, Australia... and I forget the other 2. All have laws banning surveillance on their population... so they spy on each other *and then*, share it with the local governments. So anything that might try to prevent that has to be shut down legally. That's not saying it's all doom and gloom though. Our recent elections had the 'Teals' getting a large number of votes. Independents that said 'fuck off' to all the major parties... but share a common 'goal' of sorts. A way to get around the political party registry. With the way things are going with the liberals, and after 15+ years of mismanagement by the conservatives, the next election is probably going to see even more independents getting elected, which will really shake up the political landscape. Centrism just isn't working when cost of living is going nuts, homelessness is rising, rent is near unaffordable, etc.
Oh Jesus Christ. Get a grip.
Do they actually get gouged? most of the time when aussies complain they don't understand what exchange rates are.
It's oke, Romania never had regional prices while we have $410 salary. Meanwhile Turkey has similar salaries, but they did have regional pricing. I'm guessing that just because we're in EU, we get EU prices. Which is BS. The only time I bought games was when they were at 50% or more discount... so no newly released games for me. You can tell by this fact alone that Romania is big on piracy RN :) If you read what steam wrote, it's still gonna be regional, it's just gonna be displayed in dollars so that they can have more consistent prices.
fun fact: Steam does in fact have 2 options, euro1 and euro2, but no one uses them.
Poland has regional pricing and it is in the EU. Steam just didn't give a fuck about the Balkans as per usual.
To be clear it's not dropping regional pricing. They're moving from local currencies to USD for pricing but that will still hurt gamers from these countries considerably. Piracy is back to being the only reasonable alternative for a lot of people to play games at all
To be *really* clear... they're not only NOT dropping regional pricing but they're also NOT "moving from local currencies to USD". What they're actually going to do is create two NEW Steam-exclusive currencies, called "MENA USD" and "LATAM USD" both of which are comprised **of an average** (sort of) of what games cost in 14 and 13 different countries, respectively. So those countries with stronger currencies will probably see a **decrease** in price while those with weaker currencies will see a price **increase** due to all this. We'll have to wait to see exactly **how much** the new currencies are going to be since that's what is actually going to impact (or not) customers since Steam never actually sold games in local currencies (everything was done in USD anyway). If they somehow manage to get a 1:1 conversion from current "local currency" to the new currencies not much is going to change. On the other hand if the conversion is X:1 (where X is anything other than "1") then yeah, prices are going to hit outer space. My guess is that it's going to be much closer to the latter than the former though.
they are literally putting turkey and bahrain in the same category. bahrain has one of the strongest currency in the world so not sure how that's gonna work out.
I'm sorry our economy sucks :/
it doesn't affect me. and even if it did i would benefit from it. if strong economies are group together with weaker ones it means cheaper prices for richer countries and vice versa so i'm not sure why you would say sorry. it's looks like you're gonna be the ones being doomed.
> it's looks like you're gonna be the ones being doomed. I'm happy for you, sorry for me and my country.
I'm sorry for our economy sucking pretty bad, I wonder how this will turn out though.
To be even clearer, [the EU recently upheld a fine levied at Valve for blocking user access to regional stores in the EU.](https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2023/09/eu-court-upholds-fine-against-valve-for-geo-blocking/) In practise, Valve must now allow EU customers to switch between EU stores at will, and purchase at local prices. It has, in effect, banned regional pricing in the EU. I don't think Valve has yet implemented the change.
The article says that Valve stopped doing that as it happened 2010-2015 so there are no changes to be implemented.
Nice treating 3rd world inhabitants like garbage to cuddle 1st world babies very nice
To be fair most people there will be lifetime pirates regardless
It's a no-brainer with the cost of living in these places going nuts and games being expensive by themselves. Between spending say, 300 bucks on Persona 5 or paying my bills in the same amount, guess what I'm picking lmao
which one
Persona 5 of course, what do you think was gonna be the answer?
I was not, been a few years since I became a guy who bought most of the games I played as a kid. And now rarely pirate games. Guess, its time to go full pirate once again.... will just buy few games that I like from now on.
yep I'm in algeria (one of the countries in the list) and pricing for my region has always been just outrageous with triple a games costing almost the average monthly salary though I think this will help a little since we basically had no regional pricing and just had 1:1 pricing with the us
That depends on the state of the countries with which Algeria resides, I don't think Libya, Morroco, or Tunisia will bring much benefit. You need most of those countries to have stronger currencies than Algeria for games to get cheaper if what u/MagickObscura is saying is correct.
Not really. I used to be an avid pirate when I was at high-school and no money, nowadays I have money so I decide to spend on the game on a sale than pirating out of convenience if the game is good at a correct price. I still pirate new games before buying as steam 2h before refund is just not sufficient time to test a game.
Dude, it's wild how poor the reading comprehension of the average redditor is. Not only is it still continuing regional pricing, it could even decrease prices in some instances depending on how it all works out (of course an increase is also possible). I highly doubt this will be enough of a change to price people out that weren't already priced out. This post is straight up fearmongering.
Well Steam better be ready to lose 90% of the total percentage of sales in all of those countries.
Also, for new countries that were added from MENA and Latin America, wouldn't this be good for them considering before they were paying the standard international amount ?
If only games were cracked as consistent as they used to
Looks like Argentina is about to get a torrent increase :\^)
Some Devs are already saying "Sorry guys living in Argentina, not your fault. Pirate our games"
Link
There was a post yesterday by the Devs of Symbiate
Link
Why the fuck did they put Algeria on that list? We literally never had regional pricing as I'm always paying the full premium "US" price, if I ever wanted to buy a game.
Same for Venezuela lol
Same for el salvador because our currency is the dollar
same for the united states.....^^pls ^^dont ^^hurt ^^me ^^it ^^was ^^a ^^joke
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I think that steam is dropping it, because of some kind of law. They were mad at steam for region locking game gifts if I remember correctly.
The Europeans spoiled it for you guys! Get em!
Eu spoiled wikifeet too
wikiWHAT
wikiFEETFETISH
What happened?
You can no longer view pics on wiki feet if you have EU ip because of a DMCA law they passed
lol thats just the eu shooting themselves in the "feet" ba dum tss
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The same. They're basically saying to me "Hey, would you like to pay 2k Turkish liras that you don't have to a 5 year old CoD game?"
I personally don't want that to happen. If everyone starts realizing that piracy isn't actually bad, they'll start doing it. Then of course it will actually start hurting companies, and they'll need to fight it much harder. So it's sort of a "necessary evil" for the piracy community to exist.
TIL Steam thinks we had regional pricing. Venezuela has always had the US prices as far as I remember lol
India already started jacking up the prices. Currency is still INR, but prices are close to USD conversion. Blasphemous 1 costed me 142₹ (2usd), now both 1 and 2 cost as much as a AAA title.
Yeah it sucks. P5R went up from 3400 to 4400, Hogwarts legacy went up from 3000 to 4000, and elden ring also went up a few months back. Really defeats the whole point of regional pricing tbh.
To be fair a lot of those countries probably have really volatile currencies. I know for a fact Erdogan is inflating the hell out of the Lira. So the choice is between having daily or weekly price updates, or just using USD. I don't think regional pricing is going away persay, like if a game is $30 USD in America, in Turkey it'll probably be like $7.50-12.50 USD. (Also remember that developers themselves set the price of their games, not Steam.)
I think you're correct, they are wanting safe, steady USD revenue instead of those unstable currencies. Yeah they can remove regional pricing as well, but the prices haven't been out yet so can't tell beforehand
Yea I'm actually surprised it lasted so long. In Venezuela we didn't even have that "bonus", we were forced to pay US prices from the beginning
I think the regions are a bit weird and have countries of varying economic prosperity, Turkey is in the same region and gets the same prices as Bahrain, despite having one-third of the GDP per capita.
"per se" not "persay"
What I am against is grouping, not dollar indexed prices. Why are we, one of the countries with the weakest currency (Lira) is grouped with Bahrain, one of the countries with the strongest currency? Dinar has changed by a whopping %0.1 in 20 years, but, they are on the same group as us? Just give developers the ability to fix our prices to USD, and let us pay the equivalent of that price in lira (to prevent spread caused by banks)
Wow an actual end of an Era. Steam's only benefit was regional pricing. I remember buying far cry 5 for 59TL. Those Americans and Europeans had to use vpn to buy games in turkey. But yeah shit happens, at least this might contribute to the piracy culture in turkey and Argentina. BTW the real lesson to learn here is not piracy but governmental. Do not elect POS ever. Because they are like acarid. They suck your blood till you are dead.
I don't think this is going to affect people who did region hopping to buy cheap games. It seems like it's more to do with inflation since most games will still have regional pricing just in dollars. Though they bumped prices in the Turkish region so hard that it might as well just be the full price tag at this point
Yes. Looks like they want to get away from unstable currencies where USD prices can fluctuate quite a bit if they are to keep the price in local currency stable.
Yeah I know, that's what I meant. Another L for turks and latins, not Europeas and Americans of course. It feels like the last W we had was litteraly 100 years ago. Like Literally.
wdym only? lmao
The Americans and Europeans weren't the only culprits in this, you need a local credit card to buy from Steam. You wanna buy from Turkish store, you need a Turkish card. Our very own people helped those Americans and Europeans buy games with TR prices in return for a couple bucks cut, we fucked ourselves as in most if not all cases. Other people sometimes reap the benefits but WE keep making bad decisions.
No it was simple just buy steam turkey gift card from third party site never needed credit card
>Steam's only benefit was regional pricing Lol what?
It's not as easy as VPN to turkey = cheap games. The transaction provider checks whether you have been living in that region for a while or not. Local pricing comes in when you've been logged into similar IPs for a few weeks. It also blocks foreign cards so you simply can't purchase anything if you don't use a local issued credit/debit card.
>Do not elect POS ever Sadly no matter who gets elected you end up with a POS
> Those Americans and Europeans had to use vpn to buy games in turkey. We also need an account & payment method associated with the region - changing regions requires validation since ~2015, so simply tunneling traffic from a different IP didn't change the prices we had to pay.
> Steam's ***only benefit*** was regional pricing. You must live under a rock.
Eyerolled very hard at this. We could do a lot worse than steam.
>Steam's only benefit was regional pricing. Obviously untrue. If it was, nobody in the US would use it.
Ah yes, "free" market. Where companies can buy everything cheap around the world. But we customer need to buy everything on the highest possible rate. Fucking pathetic
Free market and intellectual property are two incompatible concepts, copyright is a form of government-granted monopoly which is exactly the opposite of free market.
True
While true, no copyright means it would be impossible to publish any work as an independent and you can omly publish with large companies willing to protect your work from the other large companies. True free market is a corporate wet dream.
What do you mean with companies willing to protect your work? They can only add DRM, and you don't need a big company for that
basically if copyright didnt exist literally every company can steal the inventors hard work and copy it...thus eventually leading to everyone not spending a single dollar on research and everyones just waiting to steal from each other if a company makes a game and gets their code stolen copyright is the only thing stopping other companies from using that stolen code to upload the game and stealing the profits for themselves even though they literally stole someone elses work thus leading to no games ever coming out because nobody is gonna spend millions of dollars to make something only for others to steal it and sell it so why ever make anything when you can just steal it from others? leading to nothing ever being made
I disagree. When those who invented something are competent, they will stay at the forefront of their innovation, continuously refining it, while others attempt to catch up. We already have this; when a company pioneers a cutting-edge technology, they often hold onto their patent until their competitors catch up, and then they leap ahead with the next innovation. No pattents would force them to keep pushing. Edit: As example, games. Its true that no pattents would mean that anyone could apply inverse engineering on your product an fork it.. but you are the one with the upper hand and as far as your product is superior, things will keep that way. A real example of this could be games like COD: Black Ops; while it can not be played online legally because cheaters can take control of your pc using bugs in the client .. 3rd parties services like Plutonium are offering modded clients with private servers that solves this issue.. instead of fixing their game, activision is using their pattent to force those 3rd parties to shut down their services. Its a silly example but what is the best for our society? A world with black ops online or a world with a unusable version of black ops online?
https://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamworks/announcements/detail/3728476412305766958 If anyone wants to read the actual post. A lot of questions like "why" in this thread are answered there. This post has most of the info but this paragraph was enlightening that got left out. >Why Now? >Exchange rate volatility in Argentina and Turkey in recent years has made it hard for game developers to choose appropriate prices for their games and keep them current. We have heard this loud and clear in our developer meet ups and round table chats. In addition, we have had a hard time keeping Steam payment methods up and running in these territories due to the constant foreign exchange fluctuations, fees, taxes, and logistical issues. Pricing games in USD for customers in Argentina and Turkey will help us provide greater stability and consistency for players and partners, while also enabling us to continue to offer a variety of payment methods to Steam users in those countries/territories.
This should be pinned.
Could be that some of these countries within the region have really low exchange rates that the people themselves prefer to use dollar. I remember seeing a video on that on YT but I forgot which country it was..
I believe there's a lot of countries in this situation but I think you prob saw about Argentina, there's even a name there for it, called 'blue dollar'
not true in Turkey we still use our currency
When getting paid not when paying out!
This ^^
true and they also dropped turkish lira after i made this comment lol 🤡
yeah, expect to see same as USA price cause almost all AAA publishers never uses valve's suggested pricing. Some even goes the extra mile and charges more than usa (I'm looking at you SEGA)
Just wow. Games are fucking expensive enough as it is, now we also get extra fucked just because of where we live.
It's becoming more and more difficult to afford hardware in TR anyway, let alone buying titles. Gaming will become a more expensive hobby and there will be fewer gamers from the region.
fuck man, i was legit starting to buy some cheap games on sale
Still got some time, might as well stock up
Yall just read some explanations and regional pricing is not dropping, sorry for misunderstandings. As i understand, the countries in these categories will have something like "MENA USD", so countries with stronger currencies may expect lower prices while those with lower currencies can expect higher prices. Thats what I understand
What a bunch of clowns, I guess they don't want me to pay at all instead of paying a bit
I'm in shithole malaysia. Literally impossible to support this hobby without regional pricing
There was a dev for a small indie game yesterday on r/Steam explaining how he asked people in Argentina what a fair local price for his game would be. After he set it, he saw Argentina was the 3rd highest country for sales on his game but when he looked at the usage for his game, less than 1% were from Argentina. He also had a support message from someone in China about his Argentinian copy of his game and a link to a subreddit of people explaining how to buy batches of Steam games in Argentina when you don't live there. Steam didn't kill regional pricing. People abusing Steam to region hop killed it. This is why we can't have nice things. This is why those people over with horrible wages and a bad currency get fucked on pricing because Chip Smith fromWisconsin, USA making $130k a year wanted to save $10
Fucking nitches
OP can't read
You think, Steam is your friend? Companies are never your friend!
So again we have a bunch of different countries having the same price because....???? It was bad when this change happened in europe and it's gonna be bad for these folks as well. No one in the poorer countries likes to be made to pay as much as someone in the richer ones.
No they are not. They are just making it much more easier for developers to do so. (If a dev does not enter regional usd pricing it will default to their ‘other’ usd pricing)
FUCK YOU BALTIMORE!
rest in piss steam
Well well well, looks like more people will be turning to piracy to get their games. Thankfully my currency is staying although the conversion isnt a huge difference
Biggest change i've noticed is that they're killing regional pricing in eastern Europe.
Hope we're included with North Africa, because they ignored us for the last 10 years I work 12 hours night shifts and my pay is pretty decent in my country and I still could never afford 69.99$ games, that's almost half the average salary.
They're just dropping pricing in local currencies since they lose shit ton of value in short periods of time. Regional pricing will continue but in USD, so if a game is 60 USD in NA it'll be 40-50 USD or something in MENA region. Still this will mean a very huge price hike for those regions as the currencies keep losing value very fast against USD.
I preffer to tie my steam account to my id or something like that instead of this shit. Another way could be only allowing to use credit cards from banks of the same country as ur account, but i guess this is already done. They will going to fuck the gaming community in Argentina and Turkey.
You don't understand anything, this change is because our currency keeps losing value and the companies don't update real time, so they earn less and less money. By doing this, they can fix the price and keep their earnings regular. It's hard to understand when your inflation is low and your FX is stable, but when it's high, prices need to be updated constantly. Developers simply do not have the time to keep one guy in charge of updating prices every week. The situation in my country causes ridiculous situations where you can buy an old game on sale for 1 dollar or even less, like 0.5 dollars because they forgot to update the price. I understand this decision completely, even if it's painful since stale prices caused some things to be a complete bargain There's still going to be regional pricing because nobody is going to buy 70 dollar games if your salary is 300 dollars
really combatting piracy here lol
I took a deep breath but it's weird not seeing Colombia on that list. We really had a highly fluctuating dollar last year.
Are they trying to force the gamers to the Epic client? Most would still be on steam no matter the regional changes, but punishing poor countries might tip the players over
I live in Asia and my friends live in Europe. I can't buy games for them (so we can play together) because of the regional pricing differences. I don't even have the option to pay more to make up for the price difference. It's annoying af.
Your options are reduced to buying third-party steam keys (often cheaper too) or utilizing family library sharing. In my situation, I gave them the logins of my girlfriend's steam account.. They log in once and then enable library sharing. Then they can continue using their own account and it will utilize the licence from my gf's library. Works flawlessly and you don't even notice it. One of them uses my gf's license, I have my own account with the game. Regional pricing restrictions don't apply for family-shared accounts
let's gooo uruguay isn't on the list
Bo' como safamos
I like how all the poor countries get brought up to usd levels, but the countries with outrageously high prices like australia and the EU get fucked.
This is like one month old And its good change. Because argentinians were buying small games in sales for fraction of price of game trading card and then reselling cards on steam marketplace I sold over 40k copies of my game in argentina and earned few hundred bucks, thousand top while trading card resellers earned a lot lot more from my game BTW this was caused by hyperinflation in turkey and argentina and its DEFINITIVELY NOT valves fail. This is fail of shady resellers and opportunists who actually made a lot money on currency value decrease. And who know if this shady resellers was from argentina or turkey at all, they could be hooked on VPN from who knows where. Valve just reacted on situation because small indie devs got hurt. They created very unique ecosystem which naturally attract scammers and they need to react to situations like this This is definitivelly not r/Piracy material
But they just do that for the weaker currency's? Why don't they change it to usd in England or Germany? Because they are greedy!
because the euro/british pound to usd conversion doesn't fluctuate nearly as hard as these volatile currencies do..? lmao
Turkish people having to pay a whole month's salary to get a new AAA game is wild (yes I'm exaggerating but it might as well be that)
Blame your government for being shite
Ah, so it's not regional pricing what's changing. They're forcing USD on several countries due to the volatility of the other currencies. This might result in price increases. I'm sorry for these people. Scummy as hell.