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Comment on "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"

snooggums@piefed.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

While I get the underlying point, any schedule for changing prices is going to cause a proportional gap as well. Even changing annually will have points in time where purchasing power relative to the dollar changes.

Plus constantly chaning would seem like they are trying to get more at certain times. Honestly there isn't a pricing scheme that involves the US dollar that isn't just converting local currency to dollars at the time of purchase and that is a whole can of worms too.

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sibachian@lemmy.ml ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
they changed the model back when the dollar collapsed which ended up like a firesale for those aware. i bought sooo much within those 2 days window lol.

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echodot@feddit.uk ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
The whole thing is stupid anyway.

If I have a game that I’m selling for $30 that doesn’t necessarily mean that I convert into the local currency and sell that game for $30 in Nigeria (I have no idea what currency they use in Nigeria).

I might not be able to sell the game for $30 in Nigeria because that might be 3 months of the annual income. But I don’t want to totally give up on the Nigerian market so I sell the game for $5, that way at least I’m still selling the game for some money.

To be honest I would probably prefer not to be basin my game pricing on the US dollar anyway right now. It doesn’t seem like the most stable currency. Not many never was anyway.

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- Munkisquisher@lemmy.nz ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  But it’s the opposite in NZ and Aus, we pay more when converted back to USD while the spending power is much less.
  
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  - echodot@feddit.uk ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Well if it’s AZ, my game would probably have been banned.
    
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  - prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Don’t you guys have a VAT?
    
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- Shiggles@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Sure, but people just set their VPN to Nigeria and bought their games for $5. This isn’t the cleanest solution, but they can’t just do what you said.
  
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  - chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    You a can also buy common university textbooks from India at a fraction of the price they sell for in the US. I say take your deals where you can get them!
    
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  - Gutek8134@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    According to my flatmate, it’s already been a thing for some time
    
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    Ugurcan@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    It’s been a thing since forever. There’s an industry revolving around regional pricing scalping, led by Kinguin, Eneba etc…
    
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Keegen@lemmy.zip ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I don’t really care what they do, I just want them to do ANYTHING. Either update the regional pricing more regularly or just get rid of the damned thing and let me pay in USD/EUR. There are some rare publishers that will actually go out of their way to manually set the regional pricing to make it reasonable but most of them just follow the default suggested Steam one leading to massively overpriced games. I’m Polish and at this point I only buy games on sales, the final price still often comes close to what the game would cost me in USD/EUR without any sale.

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Aatube@kbin.melroy.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
It seems like at least changing annually would be better than the current system.

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