How to price an indie game on Steam

The most reliable starting point is how much game the player gets and what the norms of your genre are. Players carry rough expectations: a short, tightly authored experience reads as a lower priced game, while a long, systems heavy or highly replayable one supports a higher price.

Do not price on how long the game took you to make. Development cost is invisible to the buyer. They price on perceived value, which is mostly content, polish and genre expectation.

Pull a set of genuinely comparable games, similar genre, similar scope, similar production values, and look at where they landed. Ignore the outliers at both ends: the breakout hits distort upward and the desperate discounters distort downward. You are looking for the honest middle that players in your niche already accept.

Compare base prices, not sale prices. A game frequently seen at a discount still has a base price that anchors its perceived value, and that base is what you are setting.

Steam lets you set a price per currency, and a raw exchange rate conversion often produces prices that are far too high relative to local purchasing power in some countries. Steam offers conversion methods beyond the exchange rate: one built on public data about purchasing power, and a multi variable method that weighs local purchasing power, the expected cost of comparable entertainment goods and the exchange rate¹. Valve asks for the same care here as with the base price, adjusting for the economic conditions that affect customers in each region¹.

Steam suggests a price in each currency through the Propose Pricing tool, relative to the USD price you pick, and you can accept or adjust every one of them¹. Start there rather than leaving everything at raw conversion. There is also a floor to respect: the minimum base price is the multi variable conversion of the $0.99 USD tier, and the lowest possible transaction price is 50% below that, so a base price under the floor in any currency stops you from scheduling new discounts¹.

The sticker price is not your revenue. Steam pays on net revenue, which is gross revenue less applicable adjustments, and those adjustments include taxes, returns and chargebacks. The revenue share is applied to that net figure, not to the sticker price².

Tax works differently by market. In countries where Steam collects VAT the tax sits inside the price the customer sees, while US and Canadian sales taxes are always additive³. Payments can also carry withholding on US source income, between 0% and 30% depending on what the Steamworks tax interview establishes³.

When you model a price, model the take-home, because a decision that looks fine on the sticker can look very different net.

Raising a price on Steam is allowed, but the rules make it costly. Valve asks that price changes wait until 30 days after release, and increasing a price in any currency blocks you from discounting for the next 30 days, a rule the documentation states has no exceptions¹⁴. You also cannot change the base price at all while a discount is running or already scheduled⁴. Underpricing is not a decision you can quietly reverse: correcting it costs a full discount cycle.

So set a base price you are comfortable with long term and use a launch discount to reward early buyers instead of starting artificially low. The launch discount has to be configured before your release date, it cannot be added afterwards, it runs between 7 and 14 days, and it is capped at 40%, though Valve suggests around 10% to 15%⁴.

Then discount patiently. Outside seasonal sales, a product cannot be discounted within 30 days of another discount⁴. Valve is explicit that rushing into a 50% or 75% discount weeks after launch, or releasing with a very high launch discount, sends a bad message to the customers who bought at full price and undermines the value of your title⁴.