It looks like Valve Corporation has very quietly decided to drop their recently placed 2-Tier pricing policy for the European Union and replaced it with a non-legacy based uniform pricing policy throughout Steam.
The immediate effect of this is that a number of video games will now be priced higher in as many as 25 countries – and that includes games published by Valve itself as well.
However, before you jump the gun or something, this news has not come directly from Steam although the picture of an email that has been sent out by them to the partners has surfaced online that announces the removal of legacy support for Euro Zone 2 prices on february 16, 2016 i.e. two days ago.
Here’s an excerpt from the said email:
Valve has not officially supported Euro Zone 2 pricing for quite some time, though through legacy configuration we allowed prices to be defined for that region.
We will be removing all legacy support for Euro Zone 2 pricing as of February 16th. For the majority of titles on sale through Steam, there will be no difference. If your specific title had relied on regional pricing for Euro zone 2, the price of your product will now be set to a euro price that is consistent throughout all the affected countries. If you have special price settings applied to specific countries, there will be no change.
There have been a number of titles that were available for less in multiple countries in the past, but it looks like Valve Corporation has had to change that in line with new pricing rules and regulations that have been passed for the European Union.
If you don’t bother much about the well being of services like Steam, this most likely will result in a hike in piracy.
