Briefly, after the Steam's regional pricing update on November 20th, only %43.4 of the developers applied the recommended pricing. Since the developers need to manually set regional pricing for the players, prices of the other games are set to US prices by default, making it extremely difficult for people to buy games for people who are living in MENA and LATAM regions.

Thank you so much for considering to set a regional price!

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Dear Steam, game developers, and publishers,

With this campaign we would like to bring your attention to some important issues that have arisen after the change in regional pricing policy on November 20th. As communities who believe that a healthy gaming culture is a societal necessity, we ask for your immediate action by the fact that the current circumstances are harming both the developers and players. 

With this letter, while aiming to amplify the voices of the players in our region and our community members, we would like to propose feasible actions to resolve and improve this situation for the benefit of all game developers, publishers, and Steam.

We can understand that the recent change in regional pricing resulted from obvious economic factors, and this change was needed to protect the rights of game developers and publishers, even though it resulted in some classic games increasing by 1000%.

However, according to our research, nearly half of the developers and publishers may not be aware of the recent regional pricing changes or they decided not to localize their prices anymore. While the proportion of apps and games with local pricing was around 99% before this update, that percentage has now dropped to 58% because Steam decided to make pricing default to their regular USD pricing if a developer doesn't set LATAM/MENA pricing before November 20th. Therefore, we believe that this negative result was unintentional. We ask Steam to issue a reminder to developers unaware of this situation and reconsider the default pricing decision.

The second main concern is related to the pricing method and currency fluctuations. Currently, the prices in the store are not constant and dependent on bank hours, which leads to varying exchange rate spreads when paying in US dollars. So, the final purchase price is influenced by multiple factors, such as the customer's bank, the time of purchase, and other parties involved. These price fluctuations can be crucial for players, causing confusion and uncertainty while purchasing. Since Steam already had the ability to take payments in TRY or ARS before the recent change, we ask Steam to ponder taking payments in Turkish Lira or Argentina Peso with the live exchange rate.

In summary, we strongly believe that every developer should be able to gain profit from their craft and we heavily discourage the use of piracy. However, we are afraid that pricing beyond the region's reach makes it increasingly difficult to maintain a healthy gaming culture, and may heavily affect the purchasing habits of the players, which would be even more harmful for the whole gaming industry. This is a major concern that we share with Valve and indie developers worldwide.

We hope that our message can be the start of a conversation to help alleviate some of the burdens caused to our peers, the players in our region, and our industry. We wholeheartedly believe you share our concerns as you value the gaming industry as a whole. Despite some challenges we have faced, we are committed to sustaining a healthy gaming culture in our region.

Sincerely,

-ÜNOG Game Developers Community