If you are a PC gamer who had Steam installed on your computer, the latest announcement would have your wallets thinner by at least 40%!
According to Valve, there would be a 42% price hike on video games for Steam users in Malaysia following an update to the platform’s pricing tool.
In a blog post, Valve explained that the updated pricing is to help developers and publishers on the platform to determined a suitable price for their game in US dollars but are unsure about other regions.
“These recommendations represent how we would price a game in other currencies, given a base price in USD. For instance, these suggestions might be helpful if you’ve already decided to charge USD$19.99 but aren’t sure what to charge in Qatari riyals or Norwegian krone.”
“We think it’s a helpful guide, but with purchasing power and foreign exchange rates constantly evolving, we needed to make significant changes to those conversion recommendations to stay current,” the post reads.
With this new pricing guide, nearly every price point when converted from USD would see an increase, except for Kuwait, Israel, Costa Rica, Singapore, the UAE, and nations that use the US dollar.
Unfortunately, the Malaysian Ringgit is not part of this eight currencies. Thus, Malaysian gamers can expect to pay up to 42% more for their video games in the future.
Not only Malaysia
Meanwhile, several other countries are experiencing the same. For example, Argentina was hit with a 491% hike, while Turkey with 488%.
Earlier, Valve noted that gamers had abused the regional pricing for titles like Dead Cells, which was 70% to 90% cheaper in regions like Argentina and Turkey, by using VPNs to make purchases. This had resulted developers being forced to raise the regional pricing for the title.
It is noted that Valve had updated the higher price tag for the games it developed and published following the announcement.
Meanwhile, Valve stressed that the updated pricing is only meant to be a guide for developers on how to price their releases in these regions.
“Just like always, publishers set their own prices on Steam. Your prices won’t change unless you manually submit and publish new prices,” Valve said.
With this, Malaysians can expect the pricing of existing and upcoming titles to increase.
