Well, this is something you don’t see every day: With Arc Raiders now three weeks from launch, developer Embark Studios has lowered the price of the game in several regions on Steam “to ensure a fairer experience for everyone.”
You’ve probably noticed that our coverage of games typically includes pricing info in US dollars, pounds, and euros—and maybe Australian dollars if Shaun or Jody are on the job. But regional pricing on Steam supports an awful lot of other currencies, allowing for local costs that are, ideally, better for consumers in other parts of the world than converting to US dollars.
In reality, though, the system works out better for some gamers than others: Some regional prices end up being cheaper than a converted price, but others can be significantly more expensive.
The price of Battlefield 6 in Chinese yuan, for instance, is ¥268 according to SteamDB, which works out to a little under $38, quite a discount on its $70 price in the US; at the other end of the scale, though, are gamers in Israel, who are going to have to fork over 299 new shekels, which converts to nearly $92.
There will be variance in converted pricing on Arc Raiders too, but following this pre-release price shift, the gap is not as wide as it could have been.
“We’ve been working on reducing the price of ARC Raiders across multiple locations to ensure a more fair price point for all,” Embark wrote on the Arc Raiders Discord. “If you already made the purchase in one of those locations, you will receive a refund automatically, though this can take a few days depending on the platform.”
The price of Arc Raiders has been lowered in Brazil, Chile, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Peru, Philippines, Taiwan, Thailand, Ukraine, Uruguay, and Vietnam, and you can see the change in action thanks to SteamDB’s price history function: The cost in Brazil, for instance, went from R$235 to R$172, while in Vietnam gamers will pay 746000₫ instead of 1040000₫.
Global economic disparity means there will never be across-the-board equity with this sort of thing, at least until we do something about global economic disparity: Prices in some countries may be higher than others, but at the same time much lower (and thus much more affordable) as a percentage of disposable income. The elimination of regional pricing in Turkey and Argentina in 2023, for instance, resulted in price increases that had a particularly pronounced impact because the average minimum wages in those countries are so much lower than they are in wealthy Western nations.
Still, this is at least a little bit of movement in the right direction, and credit to Embark for doing it—if we’re lucky maybe we’ll see more publishers taking more care with their own regional prices in the future. Arc Raiders, by the way, is set to launch on October 30.
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