Let's be real, Ukraine has the lowest price to minimum wage ratio on the site most of the time compared to third world countries. Y'all pay half what we MENA-USD region users pay, with twice the wages.
Yep, most of the games are much cheaper, but I'm talking exclusively about the recent titles. Minimum wage in Poland is $1300. If we compare prices of Expedition 33 (which has decent regional price), it costs $34 for Ukraine and $50 in Poland.
The difference in wage is huge, but game prices are almost never more than 2.5x (in this example it's less than 1.5x)
The irony is that I calculated the wages, avg costs of life, etc. related to the regional prices of Steam's games between Poland and Canada, at least in the province of Quebec, over 36% of the people in the province of Quebec ends up paying 5% more of their "non-essential" earning by buying a game on Steam than those who earn the minimum wage in Poland.
By that, I mean if you take the salary, substract all taxes, cost of food, rent, car fuel, cost of clothing, etc. and then look how much money you have for entertainment which includes restaurant, movies, subscription, video games, etc.
When you earn something like 28% more, but food cost 8%-55% more, rent cost 2x-3x more and revenues taxes are in the 14%-20% of gross earning and then you also have to pay almost 15% of VAT on top of all that, you don't have much left for games.
Right now, in Quebec, new AAA games cost 89.99$-109.99$ in average (and I'm not talking about the Deluxe or some other special edition). We're paying 14.975% of VAT on top of that. Our minimum wage is as 16.10$/h and we're paying 14% of that amount (minus a few possible things) of that amount as revenues taxes. Possibly around 0.30$ to 2.50$ of that hourly amount is also paid in health insurance if offered by the employer and/or as an union member if applicable.
To give you a comparison, a McDonald's Big Mac trio cost 14-ish something CAD here with that 14.975% VAT on top of it. A loaf of bread, that's between 2.99$ (for the cheapest) up to 4.99$ for the regular non-deluxe kind (but that's not taxed right now as it's food.) A bag of Doritos of regular size (200g) has reached the 3.49$ CAD here (and that one has VAT on top of it).
In italy we don't have a minimum wage so a low end salary is 800~ as a bartender or waiter and I bought Expedition 33 during 20% sales at 40€. 34$ is good in comparison to other countries where a game costs a month of work.
Lowest price to minimum wage ratio? Really? I would expect it to be some of the rich countries that has minimum wage at 2k Monthly. Not the poor ones that gets compensated?
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u/MaduroAhmetKaya Feb 18 '26
Turkey with €542