We fixed Steam regional pricing recommendations

Stop scamming Polish players

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Conversely, this outdated data can lead to examples where a wealthy country ends up paying less than it arguably should.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.

1. As of November 2025, a ticket for a standard projection in the suburb of Tucson, AZ costs $11.82 tax included, while in central São Paulo, the Cinemark Patio Paulista sells full price tickets at 27.36 BRL, or $5.17.

2. The PPP conversion rate is produced by the International Comparison Program, a World Bank initiative. However, due to the complexity of this task (which involve comparing ~1,000 products in 147 countries), this data is updated only once every six years. IMF in contrast attempt to update those ICP’s estimates every 6 months based on inflation and exchange rate movements.

3. It’s important to account for sales tax in the USD price because this is what a U.S. consumer actually pays. U.S.A. and Canada are unique in that their sales tax is added at Steam checkout rather than being included in the Store displayed price. To ensure a true like-for-like comparison for purchasing power, we must compare the total prices in each country. Although the effective price can vary from one state to another, our tool adjusts for this by using a population-weighted average tax.