Regional Pricing for Balkan countries

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i̷N̷S̷A̷N̷i̷T̷Y̷ 23 hours ago

Regional Pricing for Balkan countries

Honestly it's been a long overdue that Steam Introduces regional pricing for some of the Balkan countries, but I am actually surprised that not many people have brought this up already.

Bosnia, Serbia, Montenegro, Albania, North Macedonia...etc...... are all shoved into "EU" regional pricing, and are paying the same amounts of money for games as many "first-world" countries, for example Germany, but the thing is, people in Balkan countries are earning way way less than the countries of EU.

To put it into perspective, the average salary in Germany is around €4,500, while average salary in Bosnia goes anywhere from 500€ - 800€ (you can find even smaller salaries than this, but we are talking about some average's), the same goes for Serbia and pretty much every other country in this region.

There are bunch of countries having their own regional pricing that is fair for their earnings, like for example Turkey or China, but somehow none of the Balkan countries have ever received their own prices, which is pretty unfair.

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Showing 1-4 of 4 comments

rawWwRrr 22 hours ago

EU has pricing restrictions that prevents retailers from offering different prices to different countries within the EU.

Valve and some publishers actually got in trouble a few years back for attempting to do just that with keys.

So... Don't expect that to get better any time soon unless the EU is convinced to allow it.

i̷N̷S̷A̷N̷i̷T̷Y̷ 20 hours ago

Originally posted by rawWwRrr:
EU has pricing restrictions that prevents retailers from offering different prices to different countries within the EU.

Valve and some publishers actually got in trouble a few years back for attempting to do just that with keys.

So... Don't expect that to get better any time soon unless the EU is convinced to allow it.

But these countries are not part of EU

Ettanin 19 hours ago

Those countries are not relevant enough to warrant their own store regions, hence Valve, for simplicity's sake, chose to fold them into the Euro store region.

Considering them to be priced as Euro, especially for ease of banking, a separate non-EU member store region(s) would likely be abused by region hoppers in closer physical proximity to get games cheap which in turn means that publishers will use the same prices as the EU member store regions, leading to the same situation as is now.

It's unlikely that Valve would make a separate store region for these countries, because they had folded other countries with similar relevancy (or inflating currency) into USD-MENA, USD-LATAM and USD-SASIA.

Last edited by Ettanin; 19 hours ago

rawWwRrr 19 hours ago

Originally posted by i̷N̷S̷A̷N̷i̷T̷Y̷:
Originally posted by rawWwRrr:
EU has pricing restrictions that prevents retailers from offering different prices to different countries within the EU.

Valve and some publishers actually got in trouble a few years back for attempting to do just that with keys.

So... Don't expect that to get better any time soon unless the EU is convinced to allow it.

But these countries are not part of EU

Ah.... anyway....