The mystery of what you should price your game is one that I am sure will continue to remain mostly unsolved. There’s just no right answer, and to make matters worse, there’s currencies other than your own to consider. On Steam there have been plenty of occasions where regional pricing differences haven’t gone down well, primarily due to games costing too much based on local wages. However, a new Steam update should now make it easier for devs to set better regional prices.
For starters, according to this blog post, new pricing data will be available to developers to have a better understanding of specific regions and currencies (as it currently stands Steam supports 35 different currencies). The bigger aspect to the update, however, is the addition of a few new conversion methods. First up is a simple exchange rate conversion, which literally just changes the USD price into a given currency based on the exchange rate at the point in time you set it.
The second option is purchasing power conversion. According to Valve, this method “uses public data about the average purchasing power of customers within a given country and/or region.” Looking at a video from Steamworks Development, more often than not it looks like this option would make a game the cheapest out of the three conversion method results.
The last options is a multi-variable conversion, which “uses multiple data sources for each currency, including local purchasing power, the expected cost of comparable entertainment goods, and exchange rate (this most closely matches the method that was previously presented in the pricing tool).” Again looking at that video, this one seems to be a bit more of a mixed bag from region to region, so if affordability is a priority for you as a developer, you may want to use the purchasing power conversion method nine times out of ten.
Hopefully this will encourage more developers to set better prices from region to region. Arc Raiders got in a bit of hot water last year after people in several regions complained about local prices, prompting Embark to make changes in a number of territories.
