A Steam pricing expert went public at Digital Dragons this week with a warning that many developers have been quietly bleeding revenue for years, and the fix is sometimes as simple as typing a number into a box.
Steam regional pricing settings
Tom Kaczmarczyk, founder of analytics firm IndieBI, told the conference that studios ignoring country-specific pricing are effectively handing out free copies of their games. His case study: EA, which he says sees 40% of certain game units sold in Argentina while generating "no revenue whatsoever" from those transactions.
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How a currency collapse turns your $30 game into nothing
Here's the thing. When a developer sets a single base price and lets platforms auto-convert it to every other currency, that price becomes a hostage to exchange rates. If a country's currency collapses against the dollar, the local price can crater to near-zero before anyone notices. Players in that region pick up the game for almost nothing, and the dev gets pennies at best.
Kaczmarczyk pointed to Xbox as the platform most permissive about this. "Xbox in particular has never forced developers to update their regional pricing in countries where they experience currency collapse," he said. Steam and the Nintendo Switch eShop have both introduced mechanisms that push developers to update regional prices, specifically to stop studios from "leaking effectively free units" without realizing it.
The Argentina situation is a textbook example of this in action. Buyers purchase games at a price that reflects a collapsed local currency, then resell or gift those copies internationally. Kaczmarczyk described it plainly: "It's just region surfing, and then we sell it over again."
Poland is the other market developers keep sleeping on
Argentina gets most of the attention in these conversations, but Kaczmarczyk flagged Poland as a separate and equally overlooked problem. The issue there is different: it's not currency collapse, it's developers simply never setting a localized price in the first place.
"If you don't fix your prices in Poland, which many, many publishers and developers still don't, you do see a substantial suppression of sales," he said. When IndieBI adjusted Polish pricing for clients, revenues in that market didn't just improve. They "leapfrogged many other similar countries," according to Kaczmarczyk.
That's a significant outcome from what amounts to a backend configuration change. The key here is that Poland has a large, active gaming population, but players there are price-sensitive in ways that a straight USD conversion doesn't account for. Set the price too high relative to local purchasing power, and you lose the sale entirely.
Regional pricing adjustments on Steam can be made directly through the Steamworks backend. According to Kaczmarczyk, in some cases the fix is literally entering a corrected number into a currency field, yet major publishers still haven't done it.
What this means for players and the games market
For players, this is mostly interesting context the next time you spot a suspiciously cheap deal through a key reseller or a foreign storefront. Those bargain prices often trace back directly to this exact problem: a publisher who hasn't updated their regional pricing in a market where the local currency has lost significant value.
For the wider industry, Kaczmarczyk's data points to a real and ongoing revenue leak at scale. If EA, one of the largest publishers in the world with dedicated platform relations teams, is still seeing 40% of units in certain markets generate zero revenue, the problem among smaller studios is almost certainly worse. Indie developers and mid-size studios working without dedicated pricing analysts are likely leaving comparable percentages on the table without any visibility into it.
Steamworks regional currency dashboard
The talk at Digital Dragons fits into a broader conversation happening across the industry about Steam pricing strategy. Earlier this year, Valve pushed an update specifically designed to help developers manage prices across 35 currencies and 4 regional groups, a direct acknowledgment that the current system is easy to misconfigure.
Kaczmarczyk's broader point is that pricing isn't a set-and-forget decision. Currency markets move, purchasing power varies enormously between countries, and platforms don't always enforce corrections automatically. Staying on top of it is part of the job, whether you're a solo dev or a studio the size of EA.
For more context on how games are performing and what players are actually paying, check out our game reviews and gaming guides for the latest across platforms.
