The aftermath of the Steam currency change heavily altered what people could buy and started a search for alternative ways to overcome the problem.
Last month, a text with an orange background on Steam caused mayhem in two countries. Steam made a crucial decision to drop two currencies from their database and connect them to the LATAM and MENA categories, respectively. This meant that Argentina and Turkey would connect to other countries that use dollars on the platform instead of their currency. Now, taking a look at the previous years, Steam operated successfully with the Peso and Lira, but a slow but impactful rise in the inflation rate brought its demise.
Compared to other distributors, Steam took the exchange rate more evenly and tried to draw in more customers. According to Argentinian and Turkish users, Steam was the way to go when looking for deals, as the platform allowed more user-friendly and reasonable prices in the retail world. There were other markets like Ubisoft and Origin, too, but their crude way of advertising and high prices, with terrible customer support, ultimately drew gamers away. Steam was more easily accessible and used fewer resources on your computer, making it more viable.
Since Steam is preferably the choice of many customers, they keep their strict tidy and try to be more reasonable to every customer in different regions. Since the introduction of the Lira and Peso in 2014, the value started dropping lightly, but to a point where Steam kept its promise, and the exchange rate was not heavily affected. Until a few months ago, new releases tended to have higher prices than usual. Some indie games were still in 3 to 5-dollar ranges, but converted to the respective currency, indie games would cost as little as 50 cents or less.
Of course, this would lead to a massive loss for developers who wished to at least profit from their titles. Indie game developers, especially, had huge margins while selling into those countries due to Steam’s simplified region pricing. I wouldn’t know how much the difference between the money you would make by selling copies over the US and selling to Argentina/Turkey is, as I am not a developer, and developers do not tend to explain how much they profited by making the game.
Although the situation seems dire for gamers in those countries, some pricing has changed for the better. Before discussing the good sides, I want to touch upon both sides of the story. The change can be simplified as “AAA titles have better pricing while people who love indie games got screwed over.” The reason behind this is that small games still tend to have 7 to 13-dollar price tags, and even though it might seem like a small price to pay, paying over 30 times more in your local currency for a game that will not last more than three hours to play would be just outright scamming yourself.
Since I experienced the change beforehand, I’d like to showcase a few examples from the pool of games I have added to my wishlist over Steam. One of the games, Nuclear Throne, used to be priced at around 20,50 Turkish Lira, which is almost eight years old. The price tag was fair enough and reasonably reachable by anyone. The same game is currently priced at 11.99 dollars, which roughly equates to 345 Turkish Lira. That is one massive price spike for a game that barely gets played nowadays, and it is an indie game.
AAA games, on the other hand, got the better outcome as they are not always priced at their usual $60 price tag. They usually go around 30-40, which is still quite a lot, but AAA games provide more content, and, supposedly, it’s always worth the money. One of the best games to come out this year, Baldur’s Gate 3, used to be listed at $27.75 (800TL) before the currency change, and now it costs 35 dollars instead. For a person who wishes to play Baldur’s Gate 3, the price change does not matter much, but for a person who loves to dive deep into the indie world, this change is quite hard-hitting.
One question remains with us: Are any reversals planned for this action? We may never know, but if there is an outcry or a problem among those players included, Steam might revert everything. You have to keep in mind that this change was forced to create some preventative measures. Region locks can help people from that area, but nothing stops people who happen to have VPNs from changing their locations and purchasing games without ever moving out of their seats.
All in all, the change was not that bad; in my opinion, Valve had been stressing themselves enough over it as both currencies kept plummeting to the ground. The 20th of November was their last effort, and it’s over. Still, some discounts during the sales lower their discount prices even more, so we could get some titles even cheaper during sales. Trying to be an optimist is a heavily demotivating era of video games, but there is nothing we can do besides roll with it.
