Australian gamers community AusGamers had chat with Valve internal marketing and PR head, Doug Lombardi. It was a long chat but let’s look what about interesting part about regional pricing.
AusGamers: One of the big things then, that has come as a result of the selling side is regional pricing, which we happen to take a bit of a punch in the face in Australia over. Obviously, it’s a digital distribution platform, so you’re not really buying physical copies of anything. How do you guys work that pricing system out, because some games are 40 dollars here in the US but even with our dollar as strong as yours it’s still 80, 90 dollars in Australia.
Doug: It’s something that’s just really hard to navigate. The value of currencies, especially in today’s market are going up and down. When we launched Steam, the Canadian dollar was about 60 cents to the American dollar; today it’s flat even. And there’s just tonnes of currencies around the world and we’re constantly trying to match that and work with the third-party publishers and how they want to price their games in what territories and when they want to release. So it’s constantly something that there’s a big army of people downstairs on the Steam team that are trying to manage, to give the best possible results to gamers and publishers for their games.
There’s a balancing act there. Some places we get it more accurately on than we do in other places, but we’re trying to listen to people and adjust things to make sure that it’s a level playing field and that folks are getting a higher service value at the right price for their games.
And folks vote with their dollars. If we’re getting it really, really wrong, that territory or that country will turn off and we have to stop and scratch our heads and say “well where did they all go and what happened? Was it a pricing issue and we need to resolve it?” But it’s something that we’re aware of and we’re constantly trying to manage, but I think it’s going to be one of those things where it’s always going to be an ongoing effort, because markets and currencies are always changing. We’re never just going to get it right, freeze it, and it’s always going to be okay.
Source: http://www.ausgamers.com/featu…..ad/3037280 (just below the picture of Gordon Freeman)
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