Show HN: We built a free tool to help game devs better set Steam regional prices
hushcrasher.comHi 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 Following Steam’s outdated recommendations often means: - Overpricing your game, pushing players toward grey markets or alternative entertainment (e.g., Poland).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!
Looks great, and I definitely like the approach, but I wonder who would be the ideal user here.
Regional pricing is not that difficult of a problem, unless you're targeting particular customer bases and want to introduce discounts. So, I expect you'll always have devs who can't be bothered, and will opt for the defaults.
Those who want to do the additional legwork won't face that many problems with calculations, although admittedly your tool makes it easier for them. But what's the genuine difference between the default and your prices, and how much of a customer base is actually lost in that difference?
In fact, to reframe this more optimistically, I'd suggest you reach out to people at Steam (and other platforms) who are working on this. Since your tool is already free, you can aim for even more impact and tell them why their current system is wrong, why this matters and why yours is better.
If you want to adapt this to something you can monetize, I'd suggest introducing more complex considerations into the mix. What if I wanted regional pricing and info when to apply discounts where? What platforms should I support to get the most players from X country? You could leverage more data and advanced analytics to support complex decisions that users would pay for.
Just my two cents.