'Today is the end of Steam': Argentina and Turkey floored by new Steam price hikes as high as 2900%
'Today is the end of Steam': Argentina and Turkey floored by new Steam price hikes as high as 2900%
Steam's new pricing policy for Latin America and the MENA region came in yesterday.
This is a tempest in a teapot.
Steam ended pricing in those currencies and reverted the prices to USD without local adjustment.
Any developers who want to sell in Turkey or Argentina will set a local price in USD.
This really only affects older/abandoned games where the developer never updates pricing. Those games will be left charging US prices in poorer countries.
Yeah it's a nonsense. Argentina and Turkey have atrocious economies, with inflation at crazy levels. Turkey's is at 60% and Argentinas is at 143% currently, on a background of years of terrible economic decisions. Their local currencies are effectively trash so it makes absolute sense for Steam to move to dollars if they're going to continue bothering trading in those countries.
I'm from Argentina, the prices we have now are absolutely ridiculous even with the LATAM USD, an Argentinian might have a monthly income of something around 250-350USD, and some games are something along the lines of 40USD even with the regional pricing, you need to add to that the fact that there is a tax on the dollar of 155%. I assume a normal person from the US earns something along the lines of 1500-3000USD a month, so it's completely incomparable. To give you an idea, physical retro collectible games are cheaper than virtual ones.
I'll cry for you, Argentina.
It was already discovered that that was a big and game devs need to fix it manually for now.
This has been planned for months and every Turkish friend I talked to said “if you want anything from Steam before the end of the month I’ll gift it to you, just send the $3” so no, it’s not a bug.
In my experience that loophole has not worked for a long time. I have never been able to redeem gifts from friends in a low-cost region while I'm outside of the country. Even though my Steam account is also based in that same region.
Blame the gray resellers. If the world courts had found those sites illegal, then devs could likely still set regional prices without having 90% of them getting resold to the outside world.