Valve are introducing a new pricing region to Steam, so as to make games more affordable for players in developing economies.
Our wishlist of games to be priced for affordability would look a lot like our list of the best PC games.
The South Asian Pricing Region (SAR) will consist of Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Prices are in US dollars, but heavily discounted compared to the West – games are still being added, but early examples include Middle-earth: Shadow of War, which is $30 in SAR rather than $60 in the USA.
Region locks have been applied, so players in SAR can’t gift their games to players in more expensive regions.
The announcement was made in an email from Valve to developers, and has trickled out in the last couple of days (we heard of it through Neowin). In addition to the new region, Steam now supports pricing in ten new currencies, including the Argentinian and Uruguayan Peso, Israeli New Shekel, Polish Zloty, and Vietnamese Dong.
If you’re in the SAR and want to know which games have updated their pricing, this thread on the PakGamers forumis keeping track. Overon Reddit, there are calls for more regions to be added – players from the Baltic states, where minimum wages hover around €400 a month, are struggling with the €60 price tag of triple-A games that’s typical in Western Europe. “No wonder piracy is so widely spread around here,” says Average64.