You know, I know that Australians pay more than US players, who's to blame for that? The devs? The currency? Steam? I've been wondering for a while. Although I'll bet someone told me why its like that and I've forgotten.
King
It actually really varies. All of the above, at different times. A few facts:
1. Generally, publishers, distributors, and developers all want to set a fixed price for their games in any given currency.
2. Then the currencies fluctuate, and some folks wind up getting better or worse deals for a while.
3. The publisher and the distributor have to agree on all prices for any game, in almost all cases. If the developer is not the publisher, they probably don't have a say (if they're working with a AAA publisher rather than a smaller regional one, anyhow -- self-funded developers like ourselves have more negotiating power than publisher-funded developers).
4. In our case, we're both developer and publisher when it comes to online stuff, so we set the prices in conjunction with distributors. It's always my goal to make it as equitable as possible, but here's another fact...
5. Storefronts tend to like big almost-round numbers. 6.49 or 6.99 in whatever currency is okay, 6.23 is not. So if you're in the non-native currency of whatever the developer is using, you get rounded to the nearest big almost-round number. Sometimes that's rounding down if it's not far, sometimes it's rounding up. In our case usually that means that one currency might save $0.20 versus another, or something small like that... until currencies fluctuate, at which time it all goes bonkers.
My ideal solution would be to just set the price in USD, and then have the other currencies just be whatever the market rate is on any given day. BMT Micro actually supported that, but with a lot of lag and not so much accuracy. So we'd wind up overcharging customers outside the US by using that feature, and it was actually more fair to just set the currencies directly and then weather the fluctuations in currencies. At one point things changed drastically enough with pounds and euros that we adjusted the price in those currencies to better match the USD price.
But with larger distributors there's a lot of red tape to go through for that sort of thing, and they're none to happy about it generally. You can't really raise prices on the consumer or they get mad, even if it's a matter of currency fluctuations, and the distributor doesn't want to see a race to the bottom in terms of profits just because a currency is bottoming out. So it's kind of a mess all the way around.
What we really need is a global currency. I propose we have Floogs be the new currency, and everybody just use that.
