With the latest change in pricing recommendations, games developed and published by Valve itself are already reflecting the higher price tag, most notably the VR-exclusive Half-Life: Alyx, which rose from RM95 to RM133. — Photo by Hamed Taha on Unsplash
Valve is now recommending up to a 42% price hike on video games for Steam users in Malaysia following an update to the platform's pricing tool.
According to Valve, the updated pricing is meant to serve as a guide to developers and publishers on the platform, who have already 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 US$19.99 but aren’t sure what to charge in Qatari riyals or Norwegian krones.
"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 company wrote in a post on Steam.
The new recommendations range between 3% and 42% for Malaysian gamers and are dependent on the US dollar price of the title – a full list of changes across all price brackets is available on SteamDB.
Malaysians are not alone in the recommended price hikes, however, with numerous other countries being hit, such as Argentina with up to a 491% hike and Turkey with 488% being among the highest.
Before this announcement, the company had already been providing region-based pricing recommendations to developers, with lower prices in developing countries.
Gamers had previously 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, resulting in the developer being forced to raise the regional pricing for the title.
With the latest change in pricing recommendations, games developed and published by Valve itself are already reflecting the higher price tag, most notably the VR-exclusive Half-Life: Alyx, which rose from RM95 to RM133.
It is worth noting that the updated pricing is only meant to serve as a guide for developers on how to price their releases in these regions.
This year's Elden Ring, for example, was priced at US$59.99 in the US and RM199 regionally in Malaysia at launch, which is a far cry from the prior recommendations of RM95 and even the new one of RM133 from Valve.
"Just like always, publishers set their own prices on Steam. Your prices won't change unless you manually submit and publish new prices," the company wrote.
It remains to be seen if the new suggested pricing in Steam's tool will have an impact on the pricing of existing and upcoming titles, especially with Valve itself emphasising that pricing will still be done at the discretion of developers and publishers as before.
