Chances are if you’re a PC gamer, you have Steam installed on your computer. It’s one of if not the best platform to buy and play games from, being host to tens of thousands of games from indie hits to the biggest triple-A titles out there. One of the biggest reasons why Steam has gotten so popular around the world is thanks to its regional pricing.
Basically, depending on where you live, you’re able to buy games using your local currency, meaning you won’t have to pay for games in USD, unlike other popular video game platforms such as Battle.net or GOG.com. Not only is it converted to local currencies, but Steam also adjusts the recommended pricing based on purchasing power. This means that poorer regions such as South America and South East Asia can still buy games at a somewhat affordable price, as Valve recognises that they shouldn’t just see the foreign exchange rates but also look at purchasing power parity and consumer price indexes.
That being said, with inflation currently on the rise across several regions in the world, Valve is updating their recommended regional pricing guide for video game publishers. With this new pricing guide, Valve is increasing nearly every price point when converted from USD across the board, with only eight currencies unaffected (the Singapore Dollar happens to be one of them by the way). The Malaysian Ringgit is unfortunately not part of this eight currencies, so Malaysian gamers can expect to pay up to 42% more for their video games in the future.
“For many years, our team has provided pricing recommendations as a guide for developers who may not have the time or resources to sift through all 39 currencies Steam supports (it’s a lot!). These recommendations represent how we would price a game in other currencies, given a base price in USD.
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,” – Valve
For reference, here’s the list of the new recommended pricing for the Malaysian Ringgit on Steam at various price points:
As for when these changes will take place, well it’s actually already live and underway. It should be noted though that Valve themselves won’t be updating the prices of games across the entire Steam store. Instead, it’ll be up to the game publishers themselves to decide if they’d like to update their prices to follow Steam’s latest recommended regional pricing. Besides, even before this, Valve has never penalised any publisher who opts to follow their own regional pricing system.
Valve isn’t even the first major tech company to raise their prices in Malaysia due to the current inflation rates in this week alone. Just yesterday, Apple was reported to have increased their Apple One, Apple Music and Apple TV+ prices by up to RM10 per month.
