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"Valve must stop making excuses": Steam under fire for "significant price disparity for PC games," causing regional pricing that's "often 20% to 30% higher than the dollar equivalent" (www.gamesradar.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/technology@beehaw.org
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"The problem lies in the data Valve uses to make these suggestions." According to the YouTuber, Valve hasn't updated its conversion rates since 2022, when it first introduced the regional pricing system. At that point in time, "the Polish currency was near its weakest" – but Steam is still "using this weak old rate" from three years ago.

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[–] 16 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The article is doing a bad job at explaining what's going on. The backlash is specifically about Polish prices set by Valve recommendations for publishers. They weren't updated in 3 years and the exchange rates diverged making games more expensive on steam. Better explanation is at: https://polishourprices.pl/

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  • [–] 14 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I personally understood that point as well. But the point I am making is, the developer or publisher is responsible, not Valve. The price recommendation tool by Valve is just a help, not an enforcement. Before this tool, publishers did the pricing themselves and the prices "were wrong" too.

    What I mean is, as an analogy, if programmers use Ai tools like ChatGPT and produce bad code, then the company behind ChatGPT gets attacked instead the programmer who is responsible. Yes, to a degree both are at fault, but its the publishers / programmers fault of trusting it blindly.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago*

    Steam specifically designed the system to make it easier for developers to handle pricing for multiple regions, and in their SteamWorks documentation on pricing for developers in the Regional Pricing Recommendations section they say:

    "All of these factors have driven us towards the commitment to refresh these price suggestions on a much more regular cadence, so that we're keeping pace with economic changes over time."

    yet their suggested pricing has not changed since the program was introduced in 2022. If they don't want to commit to keeping the pricing up to date, as they themselves promise, then retire the program and make publishers set the price themselves on every game.

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