Story

Hi HN! We’re Antoine and Julie. Over the past few months, we’ve been publishing data-driven analyses about the video game market.

Steam regional pricing recommendations are broken. We didn’t fully realize how broken until we read the recent GDCo Newsletter and several other articles discussing it. So we decided to take a short detour from our usual market-analysis work to tackle the issue.

Steam’s pricing recommendations haven’t been updated since 2022, which creates major inconsistencies. For example, Polish players (2.3% of Steam traffic) pay about 26% more than Americans for the same game, even though their income is roughly half as high.

Adapting your game’s price to local economic realities isn’t charity. It’s primarily a question of profit. Following Steam’s outdated recommendations often means: - Overpricing your game, pushing players toward grey markets or alternative entertainment (e.g., Poland). - Underpricing your game, leading to lost revenue (e.g., Australia).

So we built this tool to calculate optimal regional pricing for your Steam game, based on up-to-date economic data. You enter a USD price and export a CSV you can directly upload to Steamworks. It updates all 40 regional prices in one go.

Bonus: We added an option to mimic Netflix’s regional pricing strategy.

We also wrote an article explaining what we did, why we did it, and why getting regional pricing right matters (it’s not just about fairness but also about avoiding unnecessary revenue loss): https://newsletter.hushcrasher.com/p/steam-regional-pricing

We’ll make the repo public if anyone’s interested.

Feedback welcome!