What an indie game costs around the world, and who ignores the suggestion

A developer setting a price on Steam types one number in dollars and is handed a full set of local prices for everywhere else. Those suggested values are not published as a table anyone can look up, which leaves the person deciding whether to accept them with no way to know what accepting them means.

They can be reconstructed from the other direction. Among games charging 19.99 dollars in the United States, one local price repeats far more often than any other in each market, and that repetition is the suggestion showing through: 59.99 in BRL for Brazil, 19.99 in EUR for Germany, 16.75 in GBP for United Kingdom. Read across markets, the table is plainly not a currency conversion. It is adjusted for what each market can pay, which is why the same game costs roughly half as much in some places and why converting your dollar price yourself gets a different answer.

The reconstruction survives the obvious check on it. Recomputing each value using only games with substantial review counts leaves 105 of 110 of them identical, so this is not the habit of small games mistaken for a default.

Counting how many of the 11 markets each game leaves on the suggested value produces a shape with two crowded ends and a thin middle. Among releases from 2023 to 2025, 49 percent sit at one extreme or the other across 1,202 games. Very few tune three or four markets and leave the rest alone.

That is worth stating plainly because it contradicts how regional pricing is usually discussed, market by market, as though each were its own call. In practice it is one call made once: accept the table, or replace the table. The developers who override it are not reasoning about Brazil and then about Germany. They are declining the whole thing.

The shape is stronger still if every release year is counted together, at 57 percent across 3,779 games, and that gap is a warning rather than a bonus. Steam has revised its suggested table over the years, so a game from a decade ago sits off today's values everywhere at once without its developer having touched anything. Part of what looks like a decision, measured across all of Steam's history, is just age. The recent window is the honest one, and it is the one every other number in this study uses.

Departures from the suggestion are not symmetric, and the direction differs by market. In Germany and Poland they run almost entirely one way: 65 percent and 53 percent price below the suggested value, while the share above it rounds to nothing in both. Those are the markets where the suggestion asks for the same number in local currency as it does in dollars, or more, and developers quietly decline.

The traffic runs the other way in Turkey and Argentina, which carry the largest shares priced above the suggestion at 22 percent and 21 percent. Those are the two markets Steam no longer quotes in local currency, so the suggestion there is a discount off the dollar price, and a developer who simply mirrors what they charge at home lands above it without ever deciding to.

That last point generalises. Pricing above the suggestion in a market poorer than the United States is exactly what a straight currency conversion produces, because the suggested table is adjusted for local purchasing power and an exchange rate is not. A developer who overrides the table with converted dollar prices has not customised their regional pricing. They have removed the only part of it that was adjusted for the customer.

Within the same release window and at the same dollar price, acceptance of the default falls steadily with size: 74 percent for the smallest band of 1,479 observations, down to 48 percent for the largest. The share pricing above the suggestion moves the other way over the same bands, from 11 percent to 28 percent.

Two readings fit and this study cannot separate them. Bigger teams have someone whose job includes regional pricing, and bigger games have publishers with opinions about protecting a price internationally. Either way, the 28 percent figure deserves attention: the largest games in this pool are the most likely to charge above what the store proposed for a cheaper market.

The release window matters more than it looks. Measured without it this gradient is partly a measure of age, since older games drift off the current table on their own, and older games are also the ones with the most reviews.

Games that list a market's language among their supported languages depart from the suggested price for that market more often than games that do not. It holds in 6 of the 7 markets tested, and the widest gap is China, where acceptance falls from 78 percent among untranslated games to 53 percent among translated ones.

Germany runs the other way, with translated games accepting the default slightly more often than untranslated ones. That market is also the one where the suggested value is hardest to accept in the first place, so the two exceptions may be the same fact seen twice.

The honest reading is narrow. Attention to a market shows up in more than one field of the same form: a developer who decided to translate is a developer who was thinking about that country, and thinking about that country is what puts someone in the pricing screen. This is an association between two choices made by the same person. It is not evidence that either choice produced anything.

If deliberate regional pricing marked a generally more deliberate developer, it should show up in unrelated pricing behaviour. It does not, at least not here. Games that keep the suggested table across every market run a median of 14 discounts in dollars, and games that replace it everywhere run 17, with the mixed group running the most of the three.

There is no gradient and this is reported as the null it is. Whatever separates the developer who opens the regional pricing screen from the one who does not, it is not a general habit of attending to price, and the ordering here is not far from what a coin flip would give.

The reconstructed values are what most developers landed on, which is strong evidence about the default and is not the default itself. If a market's suggested value changed recently, this study would show the old one until enough new games had accepted the new one.

What it does support is narrower and still useful. The suggested table is adjusted for what each market can pay, most developers accept it, the ones who override it mostly do so downward except where the market is priced in dollars, and overriding it with converted dollar prices undoes the adjustment that made it worth accepting. If you are going to depart from the table, the departure is worth being able to explain.