Thanks for raising this point! We looked into it, and it turns out the issue in the Eurozone isn’t that developers aren’t allowed to set different prices. In fact, they absolutely can.
What EU law forbids is geo-blocking. What it means is that Steam can’t stop someone in an EU country from buying the game at a lower price in another EU country.
Steam clearly doesn’t want cross-border arbitrage inside the EU, and since they can’t legally block it, their “solution” is to just enforce a single price for the whole Eurozone. However, from a developer’s perspective, it results in overpricing (=underselling) in several EU markets.
For South America, there’s no equivalent regulatory constraint that we could find.
A fun side note: Netflix does manage to charge different prices across Europe, but their defense is that they offer different catalogs, which legally counts as different products. We might wonder if these regional catalogs serve as a little trick for being able to do regional pricing. We don't have time to investigate that, but there you go, haha.
Yes! This is exactly the kind of conversation that needs to be had. I’m from South-Africa and the premium we end up paying on software and hardware as a result of import duties on top of weakened purchasing power kills us.
> Steam made a questionable choice by grouping multiple countries under a single price.
That's probably to respect the single market laws in the E.U. If you remember, Nintendo got heavily fined for not respecting those.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2002/oct/31/games.technology
Is it possible that Mercosur has similar laws?
Thanks for raising this point! We looked into it, and it turns out the issue in the Eurozone isn’t that developers aren’t allowed to set different prices. In fact, they absolutely can.
What EU law forbids is geo-blocking. What it means is that Steam can’t stop someone in an EU country from buying the game at a lower price in another EU country.
Steam clearly doesn’t want cross-border arbitrage inside the EU, and since they can’t legally block it, their “solution” is to just enforce a single price for the whole Eurozone. However, from a developer’s perspective, it results in overpricing (=underselling) in several EU markets.
For South America, there’s no equivalent regulatory constraint that we could find.
A fun side note: Netflix does manage to charge different prices across Europe, but their defense is that they offer different catalogs, which legally counts as different products. We might wonder if these regional catalogs serve as a little trick for being able to do regional pricing. We don't have time to investigate that, but there you go, haha.
Thank you for looking into that point!
Pole here, you know data behind my pain LOL
Yes! This is exactly the kind of conversation that needs to be had. I’m from South-Africa and the premium we end up paying on software and hardware as a result of import duties on top of weakened purchasing power kills us.