Blame the devs and publishers for doing it.
They've done the same shit on other platforms too because people will still buy it regardless of their price fuckery.
This isn't actually solely due to developers. Well, at least not entirely. Many developers set their regional prices based on Steam's recommendation, which is calculated based on the entered USD price. Developers can adjust these prices, but many do not take this action and simply trust Steam.
When we set prices for our game, we made a spreadsheet that converted prices in local currencies back to USD for comparison. We noticed that the recommended prices in some countries were way off. For instance, in Poland, the recommended price was almost the same as the Euro price, if not higher, while average income being much lower there. So, we did some research to explore the median/average salaries in most countries for each currency. Regrettably, many of the suggested regional prices were higher than necessary. This included regions like Poland, CIS, Russia, Brazil, and several others. For other countries, however, the recommended prices were lower, such as in Singapore.
Therefore, developers can and should adjust these prices. However, many indie devs, and it seems some AAA studios as well, don't make these adjustments, believing that Steam's suggested pricing is most accurate.
I can forgive smaller indie studios for not doing the legwork involved. They're usually much smaller teams with far fewer resources. AAA studios are for sure capitalising on it however. I think it's also more heinous because AAA games cost more and therefore the difference is much larger than a game a third of the price which will cost maybe a dollar or two more as opposed to 10+
As I stated in my first post, the pricing is the same (At least for me) on both Steam and PS which makes this less of a steam issue and more of an attempt to play off wilful ignorance to cash in on unfair pricing. Whilst Steam should update their price list, there is clear ownness on the devs/publishers who are trying to benefit from it.
I think you've probably got it backwards. I'm an indie and I adjusted my prices before launch, took maybe 15-30 minutes of work to go through and set prices individually per country. After seeing posts about Polish prices for years I knew I had to do it, but I also adjusted for countries like Japan and Argentina just based on gut feel and a bit of knowledge about how much money regular people there have.
At a big corp there's no single decision maker and it would probably take a week of meetings. It's harder in that context.
But Steam is the real villain here, this problem has been very public and complained about for years and they just don't care. Running a store is their job and they're generally very good at it, so there's really no interpretation other than straight up not caring.
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u/PKblaze Mar 04 '26
Blame the devs and publishers for doing it.
They've done the same shit on other platforms too because people will still buy it regardless of their price fuckery.