Criticism
Regional restrictions and pricing
Steam allows developers and publishers to change prices and restrict game availability depending on the user's location, causing some games to cost more than those bought from retail stores, despite digital distribution removing the costs of disc replication, packaging, design time, logistics and dealing with retail fronts.
Some of the difficulties in selling a retailing game worldwide are detailed by a forum post from a member of Valve's staff:
“Sometimes publishers are split into mostly independent North America/European/Asian divisions and one division doesn't have the rights to distribute in all areas. In order to distribute in all areas we have to negotiate deals with all the different divisions and they all have different ideas of how pricing should work and how important digital distribution is for their games. We are always trying to help them understand the importance of markets around the world as well as help them understand the importance of fair and equal pricing for all regions, but it's an ongoing struggle.”
—John McCaskey, Steam programmer, August 2008
One example of regional restriction can be seen where Valve uses Steam's authentication to prevent boxed versions of their games sold in Russia and Thailand, which are priced significantly lower than elsewhere, from being used outside those territories.
Steam offers products in three currencies; US Dollar, Euro and Pound Sterling. The currency is selected automatically based on where the user is connecting from, and cannot be changed by the user. Due to how Steam handles the US Dollar to Euro/Pound Sterling conversion, prices in Eurozone countries are often much higher than in the United States, which has led to much criticism from European Steam users since the Euro support was introduced on December 12, 2008.
