What do you all think of this? I've been using Turkey/Argentina regional pricing for years (Russia before the sanctions) but now they are going to price it in dollars. I kinda understand why devs want it considering both ARS/TRY are constantly depreciating but I fear lumping countries with vastly different income/purchasing power will cause issues.
Like why is rich Bahrain in the same list as Sudan?
Bootlickers in the comments are saying this will stop people who abuse regional pricing. Like bish, people 'abuse' regional pricing because they want to pay for the game but can't afford the full price. Why would someone go through the effort of purchasing a virtual credit card from Turkey/Argentina if they could just buy in full price dollars directly from their card which would be way more convenient? Also, others 'abusing' regional pricing don't even affect you!
Even the current pricing system is arguably nonsensical and contributes to people region hopping. Lets look at price of Mafia Definitive Edition for instance. https://steamdb.info/app/1030840/
Indonesia's GDP Per capita PPP is ~$15000 while Argentina's GDP PPP is ~$26000 yet Argentina gets much cheaper regional pricing than Indonesia! Same thing with China, games there are cheaper priced despite there being many countries having lower income.
If Valve really wants to do regional pricing they should really price it according to income/GDP PPP. Neither are best measures because inequality but it'll do.
Although I'm still glad Steam atleast has decent regional pricing unlike Epic, MS, Ubisoft etc
Lets say an American makes $2500 a month. A $60 game would be 2.4% of their monthly income. Now lets say a person in a country makes $450 a month (a pretty good wage in countries like Pakistan, India etc) that would be 13% of their income! At 2.4% equivalent it should cost $11 yet according to steamdb according to new regional pricing itll cost $27 in MENA/LATAM https://steamdb.info/blog/steam-turkey-argentina-usd/ . And don't forget to consider the fact that lower income ppl maybe less willing to spend on 'luxury' goods like games/ The new pricing disincentivizes buying games in the third world and encourages piracy, I would argue a developer getting $10 is better than a developer getting $0.
So rather than making it difficult for people to change regions (only being able to do it by showing Valve Support your visa to prove that you're in that region) and prevent buying anything when using a VPN, they decide to remove regional pricing on those areas and toss in many global southern countries with different economic conditions under one basket.
All while many Global Northern countries get to keep their own currency.
Lovely.
even now you can't buy game from say Turkey without having a Turkish card, people get around it with virtual cards but thats just a small fraction.
what you suggested would be a way fairer system than what is there currently. They could use automated verification systems like ones used by online banks. Something to verify income would be even fairer.