Remember last October, when Steam updated its pricing guidelines for non-US currencies, resulting in recommended price increases of anywhere from 18% to 485%? Well an update from Valve has announced that now the platform is changing its minimum price thresholds to match those recommendations, and the long and short of it is that any game at Steam's cheapest price point is about to get a little more expensive outside the US.
Steam's lowest possible base price point is 0.99 US dollars (not including free and free-to-play games). That's not changing, but what is changing is what $0.99 translates to in non-US currencies «to adjust for some currencies drifting significantly in value over time».
That means that games purchased using Euros, Pesos, or some other currency are getting a bit more expensive if they're currently priced at the lowest level Steam permits. What's more, how much they can be discounted is changing, too. The lowest price Steam will let you charge for a game on sale is 50% of its minimum base price, meaning 49 cents, but as with the base price itself, what 49 cents translates to outside the US is being revised upwards in line with its October pricing recommendations update.
We could use a game like Vampire Survivors as an example: That game's Argentinian price currently translates to about $0.85, according to SteamDB. Presumably, Poncle will have to ratchet that up a notch or two if it wants to continue selling the game in Argentina.
This news probably isn't too painful for people like me in the UK—despite, well, everything that's happened to this country's economy over the last seven years—but it could be significantly more wounding for Steam users in less developed economies. Steam's October pricing
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