Steam Users Hit by an extraordinary 43300% Price Increase on game titles
Valve recently made headlines when they increased prices of Steam products across certain regions, seemingly making storefronts too costly for its residents.
Valve recently took steps to localise game prices by increasing storefront prices in Argentina and Turkey by up to 4,300% in order to counter fluctuations between local currencies, specifically peso and lira fluctuations, by charging users games using US dollars instead of their native monies.
Valve’s exchange rate fluctuations include Argentina dropping from $0.00991 in November 2021 to $0.00281 by November 2023 and Turkey seeing 53% decreases between that date and now from $0.0742-0.347- Valve attempts to mitigate their exchange rates, but unfortunately this has led to excessive video game pricing in both nations.
Game developers’ efforts to capitalize on exchange rate fluctuations to maintain profit margins have left some members of their audience struggling to justify new prices introduced on 20 November.
Titles such as Hades only saw their prices increase by five percent while Civilisation 6 saw an astounding four and three quarters price hike! Diablo IV’s regional prices actually went down due to publishers manually setting regional price adjustments; an Reddit user posted all these price adjustments caused by Valve’s price increase on Reddit.
Publishers could follow in Diablo IV’s publisher footsteps by manually adjusting prices of titles in Argentina and Turkey in coming weeks, since average monthly salaries in these two nations as of November 2023 stood at just $126 and $277 respectively; residents there cannot meet Steam’s new prices without going bankrupt.
As it has only been two days since these changes were implemented, affected players hope the decision can be reversed or at least adjusted; otherwise Valve would risk alienating many customers and becoming less profitable as a result of losing them all.
