Steam’s regional pricing recommendations are decided by a few different things. Although exchange rates are a factor, Valve also base their regional price recommendations on consumer price indexes, and what they call “purchasing power parity” between different countries. “All of these factors have driven us towards the commitment to refresh these price suggestions on a much more regular cadence,” Valve said, “so that we’re keeping pace with economic changes over time.” Of course, there’s also the issue of players changing their region on Steam to access reduced prices for the games they buy. Valve have adjusted things in recent years to make it harder to do this by limiting the number of times Steam users can change their country and insist on the use of a country-specific payment method. In 2021, Valve and five publishers were fined for breaching EU anti-trust rules by geo-blocking Steam keys in some European regions. Valve said they’d co-operated with that investigation, and disagreed with the fine. You can read the full regional pricing information on Steamworks here.
