Valve is changing the recommended price for games on Steam, and Norwegians should now expect to pay about sixty percent more than previous prices.
(PressFire.no): Valve has updated how it makes pricing on Steam easier for those who publish their games there.
At the same time, Valve, the owner of the entire Steam service, announces that They change the prices of recommended games.
Valve explains that simply setting a dollar rate and then assuming it’s good enough to “translate” to other exchange rates isn’t good enough. Instead, they recommend looking at purchasing power, consumer price indices, and the like for each individual country.
To help with this, the admin tools in Steam, where developers manage their releases, have a separate “price list” with recommended prices for each market – which takes these conditions into account.
Valve points out that prices are set entirely by the developers themselves.
– Developers control their own prices for each currency. Valve writes that researching and determining the ideal prices for dozens of different currencies can be a challenge.
Steam automatically pays for its suggestions when the developer chooses the US dollar price.
This has a potentially significant impact on Norwegian pricing on Steam. Valve believes that Norwegians should pay more than 50 percent more than previous prices.
On average, Norwegian prices should be raised by about sixty percent, the company believes. The game that previously priced NOK 495 on Steam, now has a new recommended price of NOK 785 – an increase of 59 percent.
However, it must be said that Norwegian quotations have been very low so far, averaging about two-thirds of the US price.
With these changes, it is set at about 6-8 percent above the US rate.
Valve’s new recommendations, by price category, are as follows (Numbers from SteamDB):
The new bids have been implemented, and Valve has already more than halved the prices of its games. This includes “Half-Life: Alyx” (412kr to 670kr) and all previous Half-Life and Portal games (72kr to 110kr). Also some other developers raised prices.
The newly launched “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II” was released a few days ago at a price of NOK 849, which shows that Activision has taken the new recommendations seriously. In comparison, “Call of Duty: WW2”, which was the previous game in the series launched on Steam, was released for NOK 499.
Changing game prices means that the game cannot be viewed for 28 days. Since there are big Halloween sale on Steam right now, there may not be many people changing prices even after the sale ends.
This article was written by our satirical advisor Sigata Sateru, and therefore only bamboo.
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