TL;DR: Steam regional pricing recommendations are broken, so we build this free tool to fix it.

Steam’s regional pricing recommendations are broken. We didn’t even realize how broken it was until we read the recent GDCo Newsletter and numerous other articles discussing it. So we decided to take a detour from our usual market analysis articles to fix this issue.

Relying on Steam regional pricing is like using a water filter: you think you’re doing the right thing, but it’s hurting you if you don’t replace the cartridge often. And this one is three years old, yuck!

Why is it broken?

Steam recommendations have not been updated since 2022. In big 25, this is unbelievable. It creates significant aberrations. For instance, Polish players (2.3% of steam traffic) pay 26% more than Americans for the same game, even though their income is twice as low.

Conversely, this outdated data can lead to examples where a wealthy country ends up paying less than it arguably should. For instance, Australian players likely benefit from a permanent 5% sale on their games with Steam pricing given their purchasing power.

Why does it matter?

Why should you even care about regional pricing being “unfair”? Let’s be clear: Adapting your prices to regional economic realities isn’t charity. It is, first and foremost, a question of profit.

When following current Steam recos, you are very likely to lose money by:

• Overpricing your game, which pushes potential customers towards grey markets or other entertainment options (e.g., Poland).

• Underpricing your game, which leads to lost revenue (e.g., Australia).

It’s shocking that a tool so critical to a game’s success—one developers often use without a second thought—is so broken. Steam deserves props for offering this regional pricing tool in the first place (they didn’t have to!), but its lack of updates is now actively costing devs money and frustrating players.

The solution

To address this critical problem, we developed this tool:

Better Steam Regional Pricing

You simply input your desired USD price, and our tool generates regional prices based on up-to-date economic data. You can then export a ready-to-use CSV file for direct import into your Steamworks.

If your game is already live, please be mindful of two Steam rules:
1. You cannot change your price while an active discount is running, or while one is scheduled in the future.
2. If your new regional pricing results in any increase (even in just one currency), you’ll have to wait 30 days before applying any discount.

If your game hasn’t been released yet, none of this apply. Simply import the CSV and all your prices will be perfectly set for launch day.

That’s it. If you want to know more about regional pricing and what we did, you can keep reading.

What is regional pricing?

Regional pricing is not solely about converting your price to local currency, it’s about adapting it. A $12 game in the U.S., where the median daily income is around $70, cannot reasonably be sold 63 BRL in Brazil (the direct currency equivalent), where the median daily income is only 84 BRL!

So, how should we handle that? Well, Steam actually was on the right track:

“

Rather than just pegging prices to foreign exchange rates, our process for price suggestions goes deeper into the nuts and bolts of what players pay for the goods and services in their lives. This includes metrics like purchasing-power parity and consumer price indexes, which help compare prices and costs more broadly across a bunch of different economic sectors. But in the case of games on Steam, we also drill down more specifically to entertainment purchasing to better inform those decisions." Steam

So, let’s do the same. But how can we really know what things cost in each country?

Purchasing Power Parity

The local prices we’re targeting are those that reflect the same purchasing power across countries. Going back to our earlier example, the goal is to find a Brazilian price that feels equivalent to the U.S. one, meaning it represents roughly the same amount of goods people can buy. For instance, $12 might get you a movie ticket in the suburb of a medium-sized U.S. city, while it barely costs $5 in central São Paulo - the largest city in Brazil.1 So, we want to adjust our price so that it matches what people can actually buy locally. In other words, we’re looking for a conversion rate that equalizes purchasing power between the two countries.

Of course, figuring this out manually can be time-consuming. Luckily, statistical agencies already do this work for us. They track the prices of representative baskets of goods to make international comparisons, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) compiles all this data into what’s called a Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) conversion rate.2 According to it, one U.S. dollar buys the same things as 2.55 Brazilian Reals. So, if your game costs $12 (incl. taxes) in the U.S., it should be priced around 12 × 2.55 = 30.6 BRL — just under $6.3

Our tool automates this entire process and gives you the most up-to-date prices for all Steam regions.

As a side note, you should be aware that having regional pricing inherently carries the risk of some exploiting lower prices in certain areas. However, this shouldn’t discourage you from adopting a good regional pricing strategy.

We also offer an exclusive feature: you can set your prices using the same regional pricing strategy as Netflix - a multi-billion-dollar company that’s likely spent significantly more time on this problem than you and us. Using differences in Netflix’s regional prices for their standard plan, we derive an implied conversion rate (similar to The Economist’s famous Big Mac Index) that you can use to set your price. It’s updated monthly. Think about that: you get access to the pricing intelligence of Netflix, for free!

All good now?

Sadly no: Steam made a questionable choice by grouping multiple countries under a single price. This “one-size-fits-all” approach completely ignores massive economic disparities:

For countries in the European Union (EU), developers must set a single price in euros (even for countries that do not use euros, e.g., Denmark). Consequently, this unified pricing fails to account for the substantial differences in purchasing power between countries. For instance, the purchasing power in Denmark versus Portugal is vastly different. [EDIT: Steam decision seems to be related to “anti-geo-blocking” EU regulation]

Besides, Steam chose to group together countries that share a geographical region but use disparate currencies, under a single USD price designation: USD_LATAM (for Latin American countries), USD_CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States), USD_MENA (Middle East and North Africa), and USD_SASIA (South Asia). Don’t get us wrong: Setting a USD price to currencies that have a high volatility of exchange rates is a great idea. What’s problematic here is the pooling together of countries with great wealth disparities. For instance, Argentina’s purchasing power is 70% higher than Bolivia’s, but developers can only set a unique USD price for both.

Ideally, developers would be able to set a unique USD price in each individual country.

Since we can’t undo those Steam’s choices, our tool weights the PPP conversion rate by Steam traffic for prices shared across multiple countries. It’s not perfect—we still disagree with the ‘one-size-fits-all’ policy—but it’s the best way to address those massive economic disparities right now.

Yet, this is one of the hardest data to get. Everyone is quick to talk about sales (especially when glorious). There are even widely-known models to predict a game’s sales from Steam reviews. The budgets needed to make those games, however, often remain the greatest unknown in the equation. You’ll find no budgets database, and very few public announcements.1 All you’ll find are rumors and whimsical estimates.

No wonder this topic stirs up such a great passion among players and professionals.

Players love sneaking this data on forums and subreddits: they are eager to judge a game’s value-to-budget ratio and compare spending across games.

As for professionals (developers, publishers, investors), they crave benchmarks. “How do other studios handle this?”, “What genres are the most budget-demanding?”.

So, everyone wants to know! Yet, no one knows. That’s what motivated us to create HushCrasher 1 year ago. True to our mission, we used data science to predict the budget of all games on Steam. Here are our results.

Making a budget prediction model

Where does this budget data come from, you may ask? That’s a fair question because finding reliable budget figures is a hell of a hard task. Sources are scattered, journalists relay ballpark estimates; and half of the time, you won’t know if marketing is included (which can double the budget for AAA).

That did not stop us. We spent weeks scavenging web archives, news articles, data leaks, post-mortems, and forums. We also consulted some industry contacts, who generously—and confidentially—agreed to share their financial data.

But that wasn’t enough. Our dataset was nowhere big enough to draw direct conclusions about industry-wide trends. Good news is, there was light at the end. Our dataset was big enough to train a machine learning model that would generate budget estimates for every single game available on Steam.

To make our results as precise as possible, we needed to feed the model with predictors of costs. We aim to protect our ‘secret sauce’ but here’s a taste of some key ingredients: credit length, publisher’s and studio’s experience, variety of distinct job titles, supported languages, and dozens of other variables.

For such a complex task, our model achieves a high level of accuracy, predicting the actual budget within a 10% margin, on average, for now.2

We ended up with budget estimates for around 100,000 games. In this article, we present our results for the recent period of 2022–2025 and exclude games with fewer than 10 reviews. This leaves us with 19,634 games.

We owe this data to the generous developers who shared their figures. If you believe in our mission to give a better understanding of the industry, please join our effort! Submit your game budget information here. Security first: your figures will be protected by an NDA, ensuring they’ll never be shared or sold.

Tell me your scope, I’ll tell you how much you’ll spend

If you’re not familiar with Midi and Kei, check our previous article where we explain how the common categorization (indie, III, AA, AAA) was flawed, and why we had to make a better one.

Kei game developers clearly know how need to keep costs low—half of them do it for less than $65k. This mainly reflects developers’ cost of living and location. Braid, for example, costed $200k because its developer, Jonathan Blow “didn’t want to live in a shack somewhere“. Meanwhile, Eldritch, the 2013 Lovecraft inspired FPS cost a total of $22k. Its developer David Pittman also explained that “the primary cost [...] was the burn rate of my own living expenses [...]”.

As for Midi games, their budget box might look like they’re chilling with the Kei one, but don’t be fooled—that overlap only concerns the data points outside the 75th percentile. The medians show the real story: making a Midi game is actually 14 times as pricey as a Kei game.

Indeed, cost is doomed to increase with a larger team and proper company structure. For instance, Thimbleweed Park—a 2017 point-and-click—ended up costing no less than 1M$ according to Ron Gilbert.

Stepping up your scope will scale your costs exponentially: the median cost of AAs is 33x that of Midi games, and the AAAs is 10x that of AAs. With games getting more complex, it’s no surprise that Black Ops Cold War cost $700M, almost 9 times the $82M already required for Spider-Man: Miles Morales.3 While it hasn’t always been the case, AAA games now fully rival the biggest US cinema blockbusters. It’s even fair to say they now go far beyond it.

Engine War

It’s stunning that Godot is one of Unity’s biggest challengers for small-scope (<$100k) games. It’s David—the open-source tool—against Goliath, the billion(!)-dollar financed software. It’s fair to say that David got a booster in 2023 when Unity changed its pricing model. While it was fully reversed barely a year later, the trust was broken, and it gave a lasting bonus to Godot, now on the edge to overcome GameMaker.

For Unreal, the cliché that it’s mainly for large projects still holds true. Kei successes like Manor Lords might convince other. Currently, Unreal leads the high-budget game market, holding more than half of its share.

The true challenger to Unity and Unreal resides in the “Other” category. For projects with small budgets, it’s a diverse array of open-source solutions and custom engines. Conversely, at the high end, “Other” mainly defines proprietary, in-house engines—like Rockstar’s RAGE, Bethesda’s Creation Engine (though they transitioned to Unreal for the Oblivion remaster), or the impressive Decima Engine from Guerrilla Games.

The cost of (creative) freedom

Partnering with a publisher is rarer than you might think: only 23% of developers do so. When they do, it’s more than just shifting costs from self-funding to external finance. Ultimately, it results in a higher development budget, x3 to x4 on average.

This increase could mean several things:

• The spending jump may not reflect only a step-up in the final scope, but also a drop in resource investment efficiency: Publisher money might be invested less efficiently than developers’ own capital, this is known as the principal-agent problem.4 Or it might be the inevitable added cost of a professional relationship (meetings, reporting, having to justify why this step is late on top of already being late, etc.).

• This extra money could be the necessary investment to achieve a successful game. Does it? We’ll have to cross-check this against commercial success metrics. Count on us.

2D to 3D: a dime’s worth difference?

Making 3D games might have been impossible for small teams in the past, but it’s no longer the case. We now see 3D games of all budgets, from PSX stylized horror Kei to ultra realistic AAA. The large average difference in cost (3D games are 16 times costlier!) is mainly because 2D games rarely get past over $1M budgets.

A multi(player)-million dollar business

However, multiplayer games are more likely to break the million-dollar mark. While they account for only 16% of all games, they make up half of the market for budgets above $10M. This gap highlights how single player games are relatively scarce for big studios.

Conclusion

Here is a snapshot of today’s budget. Now, to get a complete picture of this subject, there’s still a lot to investigate.

First, we could wonder how those budgets have evolved over time. Have game budgets really skyrocketed over the years like everyone says? And did it concern all games or just a specific category?

Secondly, besides correlations, it would be interesting to know how creative and technical decisions impact costs. How much does a budget increase when making it 3D vs 2D? How much more does each new team member really cost in the end? Is the marginal cost of a team member stable as the game size increase?

Finally, the budgets can differ greatly between countries, and it might be insightful to look back at those figures knowing where the people behind those games are based.

Those are all food for thought, and might be the topic of our next articles, so don’t forget to subscribe if you want to stay updated.

The problem is: at HushCrasher, we believe that a serious discussion of the video game industry, from its financial health to its creative trends, requires a common framework. That's why we had to go down the rabbit hole of finding a clear and objective method to classify games, and finally conclude that using the word "indie" should be banned.

Guess Who?

HushCrasher is a scream of rage against .·✩·.¸¸.·¯⍣✩intuition✩⍣¯·.¸¸.·✩·. -based theories. Therefore, any vibe-analysis is clearly out of the question. If only there were a way to identify games that share a similar scope without making any preconceived assumptions. The good news is there is a whole strand of data science dedicated to finding groups of similar elements based on their characteristics, known as clustering.

First, we've gathered data from all games published on Steam since 2006, and enhanced it with credits from Mobygames, a crowdsourced database on games and the people who made it. Second, we looked at characteristics that could serve as indicators of a game's scope (length and diversity of the credits, disk usage, number of available languages, etc.). Finally, we ran a clustering algorithm to identify distinct game categories, as detailed in our research paper.

It turns out the main factors to classify a game are the length of its credits and its disk size, far outweighing all the other metrics! And it makes sense, those two measures are tightly linked to the amount of work that was involved in making the game. Based on our methodology, we identify 4 distinct categories of games:

- The Kei games. Those are what many would call 'solodev' games. Popular examples are Undertale, Papers Please, or Terraria. While they are often the work of a lone creator, they can also be made by a couple of friends or siblings. The term "Kei" captures this sense of small-scale, in reference to Japan's famously tiny car.

- The Midi games. Those are made by small and medium studios. Think of games like Hades and Valheim. These are in between the intimacy of Kei games and the larger ambition of AAs.

- The AA games. This is the entry point for multi-million-dollar budgets. They are developed by large teams with hundreds of credited individuals, including contractors, and a growing number of middle management and support staff (HR, finance, etc.).

- The AAA games. Here, sky's the limit. Let's just say that if a few thousands of people worked on the game and you had to buy a new SSD to install it, chances are it's a AAA.

Together they form the Hushcrasher Classification System™ 1.0 (HCS). It's a tool designed to cut through the noise, categorizing games by the length of their credits and the game size. And just like that, we've invented 2 new labels for game categories. Do we hope they go mainstream? Hell yeah! If you wish to classify a game by yourself, follow our guide.

Now that you know who's who let's see what we could learn from the last decade to better understand what's coming next.

Indie and the Temple of Doom

"Why are there no Indie category?" you may ask. Because one could award "indie" the most confusing term ever in video games. While everyone seems to agree that solodev, AA, and AAA largely refer to game scopes, this is not the case for indie games. When speaking of it, people mix in lots of others characteristics: aesthetics ("indie vibe"), creative or financial freedom, team size, IP, and intention (making games "for the sake of it").3 A good example of this is the recent confusion around Dave the Diver. For instance, if you think that 'indie' means being self-published, you might be surprised to learn that:

• A quarter of AAA games are self-published (e.g. Cyberpunk 2077, Assassin's Creed, and GTA)

• At least a quarter of Kei & Midi games, which are the types of games people would typically call 'indie', have a publisher.

We told you, this whole 'indie means self-published' is just flawed.

The Indiepocalypse Keipocalypse

In the last decade, it became possible for anyone to develop and publish a game - since the Steam Direct program in 2017, getting your game on the platform only requires a $100 fee. Naturally, competition grew fierce. We've seen a massive surge in Kei games, sometimes referred to as the indiepocalypse. The number of Kei game releases has been multiplied by 16 in a matter of years. Today, they account for more than 7 out of 10 releases. This is without a doubt the greatest transformation in this industry over the past decade. Meanwhile, the share of A-games hasn't diminished, representing a stable 3% of all published games.

Sure, there are more Kei games available, but are people actually buying them? The truth is: the shock was so important that the market simply couldn't absorb it. Despite making up 75% of new releases in 2024, the share of reviews (a good proxy for sales) allocated to Kei games hasn't changed for a decade. It remained remarkably stable, never getting above ~25%.

Of course, not all games are created equal. Many are never played; in fact, 4 out of 10 games released in 2024 haven't even received ten reviews.4 Some are likely bad, but most are certainly just less visible, lost in the overwhelming flood of competing titles. This is where the real picture comes in: Kei games have definitely swamped the market, but they haven't exactly taken away the sales. If there's competition, it’s among Kei games themselves. What we're seeing is an almost perfect split: each segment claiming a quarter of the market.

With a flood of new games and no change in market share, the median revenue per game collapsed by an astounding 97%—from $80k in 2012 to below $3k in 2018.5

On a more positive note, the "Keipocalypse" is not just about destruction. The very same factors that led to market saturation—lower entry costs and facilitated distribution—have also led to a remarkable diversification of the industry. Developers can now create titles for very specific niches, knowing that even a few hundred sales can make the project worthwhile.

Legend of Leagues

Players won't stop buying AAA because of the latest Kei game. In fact, they are probably not even the same players at all (and this might be a story for another time). This segmentation is also reflected in their retail prices, which are almost evenly spaced between each category. A Kei game costs only a few bucks, around $17 for Midi games, $40 for AAs, and $60 for most AAAs available on Steam.

Why don't we get more Open World-Platformers

A game's scope inherently dictates its genre possibilities, which means that by setting that scope, developers often tie their hands creatively. A Kei open-world would be a suicide mission, while hiring thousands of people to create a simple 2D platformer may be interesting, but would certainly be a money pit.

One way to gauge these differences is to look at the game tags that are over-represented or under-represented within each group. This reveals the usual suspects: 'Multiplayer' and 'Co-op' are common for A-games (AA and AAA) while '2D' and 'Pixel-Graphics' are distinctive of smaller scopes. This makes sense from an economic perspective, as the latter are much cheaper to make than the former. However, recent multiplayer Kei-hits such as Lethal Company and Peak might be a turning point.

The choice of scope even goes so far as to influence the type of creative risks a developer is willing to take. For instance, 3% of Kei and Midi games have the 'Experimental' tag, which is almost completely absent from A-games. Meanwhile, 'Remake' accounts for ~5% of premium games - larger studios, with more at stake, often prefer the safer bet of a known success.

AAAs cost 10 times more than AAs

What’s the one thing we can’t leave out when talking about game scope? The budget. It’s time to talk numbers. In our next article, we focus on how much it costs to make a game. Subscribe to our newsletter to be kept updated when new article comes out!