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Steam announced the highly volatile exchange rate going on with both Argentina's peso and Turkey's lira makes it hard for game developers to keep an appropriate and steady pricing for their games, which prompted Valve to make a change in the currency for these countries to instead default to US dollars, starting on November 20th, 2023. The mentioned change was notified to game developers, so they could make the proper changes to their games' pricing to take into account this new change.

The currency change has now taken place, starting yesterday, and this has seen a huge price increase for both territories, with some games incrementing no only by the hundreds in percentage, but even to the thousands in percentage compared to the original price before the change took place. Argentinian users in Reddit have put together a price table comparing prices from before Nov 20th, and after Nov 20th. Some handful of cases saw some games like Diablo IV got a reduced price after the change (-7,64%), but this is only an insignificant minority, since a big amount of games saw increases all over the board, with games like Cyberpunk 2077 seeing an increase of 66+%, going from the original price of $27,06 USD up to $44,99 USD, and in the most dire of cases, games like Stardew Valley which was originally priced at $0,49 USD, is now going for $14,99 USD, an increase of an overwhelming 2977% in price.

While the situation is still fairly recent, some game developers have noted that the cause of these price increases for some games seems to be the cause of a lack of manual input from the developers to update the price listings for their own games. Game developers were notified about the situation last month, but a lot of devs missed the notice and haven't updated their listings, which resulted in the aforementioned issue.

It's worth mentioning as well that these two countries are not the only ones which could be affected, since the volatility of the exchanges in currency in other Latin American (both Central and South America) and MENA (including middle east and North Africa) regions will also cause changes when it comes to Steam and its pricing for a number of countries located in those regions. The affected countries will be the following:

LATAM-USD Region:
Central America:

• Belize
• El Salvador
• Guatemala
• Honduras
• Nicaragua
• Panama

South America:

• Argentina
• Bolivia
• Ecuador
• Guyana
• Paraguay
• Suriname
• Venezuela

MENA-USD Region:
Middle East:

• Bahrain
• Egypt
• Iraq
• Jordan
• Lebanon
• Oman
• Palestine
• Turkey
• Yemen

North Africa:

• Algeria
• Libya
• Morocco
• Tunisia
• Sudan

Source

PS: In the table seen above, "s/i" means "without tax" and "c/i" means "with tax".

 

[LeyendaV]

The inflation in Turkey and Argentina is near unprecedented so it makes sense to ditch the currencies

Funny enough Javier Milei who was just elected in Argentina wants to change their currency to the USD - so it seems this was bound to happen to them one way or another

Yes and no. For someone who's not familiar with our countries (can't speak for Turkey, tho), I get this may be hard to grasp. After all, we live in an utterly different reality from the USA and the EU.

 

[PagaN]

Don't care, all my games free forever and ever.

 

[Xzi]

Imagine being a Valve/Steam fanboy.

Gabe Newell: "piracy is a service issue not a pricing problem"

Also Gabe Newell: [increases the cost of your games 1000%]

Imagine pretending Argentina's economy is something Gabe Newell has control over. Or that console games didn't already cost far more than Steam games there. Out of all the gaming companies, Valve worries the least about piracy. It's the individual publishers that should be concerned about losing sales when pricing out certain countries. Obviously it's something that will be adjusted over time, too, assuming they want revenue to stabilize.

 

[raxadian]

In case someone is wondering, a normal salary here in Argentina is around $150-$300usd when converted...

Actually a lot less, Argentina has between 60% to 70% poverty if you remove the subsides that by the way are less that the minimum salary.

So if you have around 60% of the population earning less that the minimum then the average salary is NOT 150 dollars or more.

 

[drazenm]

Russia inflation 2022 20%
Ukraine inflation 2022 20%
Argentina inflation 2022 95% (now over 100%)
Turkey inflation 2022 72%

The first two countries are literally at war yet the inflation is much lower - the difference is actually due to government policy - but the fact of the matter is the inflation is way too great to continue to deal in these currencies in Argentina and Turkey

Nothing to do with race, and tbh Argentinians are whiter than some Europeans

You're comparing Russia and Ukraine, seriously, seriously?

I really see how Russia is "suffering" without McDonald's, Starbucks, cola, Apple and Nike and all other stupid restrictions and sanctions that actually fired back.

Business for them is going now better then ever especially when Brics is at full swing and everyones ditching American dollar as business currency, especially China and Russia. Conclusion is world can and will keep on turning without it.

Please, just please

 

[Viri]

If you have an Xbox, you can still buy super cheap Xbox games off eneba. You can buy Hitman World of Assassination, which is still a 60 dollar game on the US Xbox store, for like 3 dollars. You just need a VPN when redeeming the key.
https://www.eneba.com/xbox-hitman-world-of-assassination-xbox-live-key-argentina
v
https://www.xbox.com/en-US/games/store/hitman-world-of-assassination/9PDRM8BFW1X1

 

[Coto]

The inflation in Turkey and Argentina is near unprecedented so it makes sense to ditch the currencies

Funny enough Javier Milei who was just elected in Argentina wants to change their currency to the USD - so it seems this was bound to happen to them one way or another

Spot on!! Our brother argentinians current %s of inflation is at least 1/5 as of Chile in the 70s, when the chilean military government opened Chile's market to US & Europe (locked down from previous Salvador Allende government):

The autonomy of the Central Bank means that the Central Bank is one more State Institution (Article 3 of Law 18.840).
As it is an autonomous entity, the other regulatory bodies, including the lower house, must agree to make changes to its operation.

As a result of this, it made very important decisions for Chile: It regulated interest rates, regulated the amount of money printed, so that the circulating capital, or currency, did not exceed the gross monetary value (wealth valued in metals and sources of national reserve).

During the military government, starting in 1973, Augusto Pinochet opted for the donation of wealth valued in metals, constituting a source of provisional national reserve, due to inflation of 500%, including the price of bread.

To solve inflation, Chile had to open up to international markets, it had to return the currency value correlative to the value of the national reserve. Once this happened, it had to raise interest rates, at first, which allowed it to restore purchasing power through the value of currency – with inflation – instantaneously. At the same time, withdrawing excess currency (which had no counterpart valued in natural wealth) from the market.

Don Hermógenes Pérez de Arce talks about this whole process, on his channel and blog. He knows perfectly well what he says, because he was a deputy, lived through the process and supported the Armed Forces, with a commission of experts, from the same branches, and they had to apply the methodology described, to recover Chile from Communism.

https://blogdehermogenes.blogspot.com/

Thus, the recovery of Argentina is taking the same route and it's great to see Steam is helping them, it'll cost quite a bit at the beginning.

 

[JuanMena]

Argentina government just approved a 155% tax raise for international bought products.

Post automatically merged: Nov 23, 2023

 

[jomaper]

Argentina government just approved a 155% tax raise for international bought products.

Post automatically merged: Nov 23, 2023

55%

 

[BETA215]

The inflation in Turkey and Argentina is near unprecedented so it makes sense to ditch the currencies

Funny enough Javier Milei who was just elected in Argentina wants to change their currency to the USD - so it seems this was bound to happen to them one way or another

What that guy is going to do will be disastrous, I've been with big anxiety attacks since he got elected. This is the worse of futures, and he won. I regret not being able to do anything about this, it'll be complete hell - the economic situation will be the least of our problems. I'm terrified.

 

[thekarter104]

You can't buy many stuff with rubles.
Many games disable support for Russia.
And Russians can't use thier bank cards to pay for any steam stuff, only buy vouchers or use other country sites to add currency on account. So if they want add it, they buy usd with commission - then steam convert to rubles with commission

Commissions, commissions, the more the better!

 

[BETA215]

I wish I had never seen the comments section of this article, I'll try to remember it next time. Sorry for the annoyance.

 

[BeniBel]

I rarely buy from the steam store, mostly from sites like g2a, way cheaper.

 

[sarkwalvein]

I rarely buy from the steam store, mostly from sites like g2a, way cheaper.

gg.deals is quite good for this.

 

[jomaper]

I wish I had never seen the comments section of this article, I'll try to remember it next time. Sorry for the annoyance.

What that guy is going to do will be disastrous, I've been with big anxiety attacks since he got elected. This is the worse of futures, and he won. I regret not being able to do anything about this, it'll be complete hell - the economic situation will be the least of our problems. I'm terrified.

We'll be fine, don't worry. Talk to me if you need to. Sending this again because it was deleted.

Vamos a estar bien, no te preocupes. Si necesitás hablar mandame mensaje. Mando de nuevo porque lo borraron antes.