I suspect piracy will become increasingly popular in these countries
At first when I saw the title, I thought this was done to stop people who VPN swap stores. The article however paints a different picture: Developers do not want Lira or Pesos since they are too unstable. Doesn’t make sense to price a game at X Argentine Peso if next month X is now 30% less valuable. If you have too much inflation, no one wants your currency. Even the Argentine government or presidential candidates said something along the lines of wanting to swap to the USD too.
There’s a running candidate that said that, but that’s the same candidate that said so many crazy shit and lies. So, you can take it with a grain of salt. Even if that candidate won the upcoming elections, I hope that dissolving Argentina’s central bank is not going to happen because of many reasons, but also because the country has a parliament… They shouldn’t allow it.
Which wouldn’t help much, because then they would depend on the dollar, the properties of which are developed for the US economy, not Argentina’s. But for steam? Whatever, charge in dollars, it’s easier.
turkish here, piracy is already a big thing for any kind of media/games here, but steam almost ended piracy for gaming. i’ve not pirated a game since like 4 years, but i suspect i’ll go back to it after this change, i’d like to support the devs but i just can’t afford it,sorry.
As someone from a developing country, I’m painfully aware of how most big publishers choose to ignore recommended prices and just go with a straight USD conversion most of the time so I can only hope this doesn’t screw them even further.
I really wish it was viable for Valve to enforce a ceiling on suggested prices or something along those lines, it’s about the only way I see that ever changing. Well, that, or everyone just becoming a full-time sailor, I suppose!
As a Turkish person this fucking sucks. I was a pirate anyway but guess I will never get to buy games
Forgive my ignorance, but what does it do to your experience practically speaking? Are the prices going up? Is it difficult to purchase things in USD because of having to convert currency?
The game prices are scaled to our “purchasing power” to some extent before the change, meaning they’re still expensive but steam is making the games more affordable for us to some extent, the change to USD means the scaling is not up to steam, there is recommended prices and if companies abide to those some games might even get cheaper but big studios tend to not do that meaning we almost get games at the price of a cheaper gaming PC before our economy went to shit.
I hope they don’t expect people to actually pay in usd and instead offer the conversion themselves. Because I can’t imagine people maintaining usd credit cards just to purchase games from steam.
Otherwise, this could be a positive change as publishers can now set prices without the “what if the currency loses half its value tomorrow” insurance margin.
Edit: steamdb has a chart of the new regional pricing. It’s 50% higher than the current one for tl and 150% higher for peso.
I mean… If the currency is that unstable… I would expect people doing that and having accounts with dollars or euros, saving money in a currency that moves more than a rollercoaster it’s not great.
