Someone who appears to be a developer has made a very serious error in a post to the Steam community. In particular see this post
steamcommunity period com/app/297760/discussions/0/522730075601074244/#c522730075913589198
Slitherine_Iain
Sorry but the pricing is comparable. When you take in to account VAT it matches up pretty much exactly and we are not planning to change it. Maybe the other developers didn't account for VAT or are subsidising European customers so they get a lower price per unit in Europe?
This statement is blatantly untrue. The price for the game in Steam in the US is US$19.99. The price in the EU is €19.99. steamprices period com/au/search?Qvadriga The maximum VAT in the EU is in Hungary where it 27%. (Hungary still hasn't adopted the Euro but Steam does charge in Euros and I presume their pricing is the same as one of the Euro regions.) I'm not totally sure if Steam charges the 27% in Hungary or they use a loophole to charge a lower VAT by operating from a EU country with a lower VAT (many countries are now stopping this from happening), but even if we assume they do and all your customers in the EU are from Hungary and so 27% of EU sales is going to VAT, this would mean the price should be US$25.3873 or €18.68. Even assuming rounding, at most this should come out to be €18.99. You can debate whether or not it's 'comparable' but I'm sure you agree 18.99 does not pretty much exactly match up to 19.99. (If I were to pay you €18.68 when you asked me to pay €19.99, you're not going to tell me it's okay since it pretty much exactly matches up.)
In reality, it seems unlikely all your customers in the various Euro regions that Steam has pricing options for (is it only 2, I'm not sure) are from Hungary. I would expect a lower average VAT. E.g. See this developer who said it was a bit above 22% becayse they had many customers from Finland forums.steampowered period com/forums/showthread.php?t=2613015 (Finland was 23% at the time). If we use a rate of 23% we expect it to be €24.5877 or US$18.08, which would suggest after rounding €18.49 or even €17.99 (presuming it's really exactly 23% average VAT you're paying, you will be receiving slightly less from EU customers if the exchange rate holds but if you're going to sometimes round up I don't see a reason not to sometimes round down when it's so close). Note that the pricing of €4.50 = US$5 is something that many other developers have found fairest (e.g. the posts I linked to or those linked in the forum). And these are developers who have properly looked in to the pricing including how much goes towards VAT and recognised that they are making more from EU customers due to the pricing differences and decided to change that. This is unlike what your developer unfortunately suggested in the forums. As this post makes clear, if anything it's more accurate to say that EU people are subsidising those in the US and NZ like me, let alone those in Russia etc. And it seems to be your company which unfortunately has not properly looked in to the VAT and pricing situation so thinks the prices matches exactly after VAT when they clearly do not. (BTW, I think the €4.50 = US$5 formula is also what was suggested to you in the Steam Forums although I'm a bit confused by one aspect of the post.)
But either way, I'm not here to argue whether or not you should charge more (even after VAT) in the EU or not as you currently do. Similarly if manually setting prices is too difficult for you, even though many are developers are able to do it, that's also your choice. And I'm not here to continue the thread, I simply wanted to offer some background so you can understand where I'm coming from and why this is such a serious problem. My concern is that you've made a statement in the Steam community forums that's blatantly untrue. I know I'm not the only person to notice this since the reason I saw it is because it was linked elsewhere and I don't even live in the EU. I strongly urge you to publish a correction or clarification to your comment. It's one thing to follow Steam automatic prices which means you're effectively ripping off EU customers. It's another to untrue about the reasons. Believe me, I'm from NZ and although we thankfully don't have automatic pricing, many large developers do choose to rip us off, whether because of agreements with retailers or their own reasons and while the rip off itself is very annoying, it's even more annoying when people tell untruths about it. (In the NZ case, we don't pay GST which is what NZ calls their VAT as Steam doesn't operate here so doesn't charge it.)
I've also chosen my words carefully. I assume this untruth was not intentional and was a maths error or similar which makes it more understandable even if still not acceptable so I'm hoping it will be corrected with a minimal of fuss. As I mentioned, the thread is closed but I assume a moderator will be willing to open it for you to post a correction. If you have problems, I urge you to escalate it to a higher level (as a developer, I guess it can't be that high), heck even if you have to contact someone in the media or the upper level management of Valve directly for the thread to be reopened it's surely worth it rather than allowing your company to come across as one which will allow such accidental untruths by your staff to stand which reflect so poorly on your company.
Cheers and hoping this very serious problem can be corrected.
P.S. As you may notice, I've had to modify the links to get around the spam filter. I'm sure you'll agree that this is not spam and the links were important to issue I was raising, so I felt it acceptable.
Edit: I made a mistake in my initial posting. I said €4 = US$5. I meant to say €4.50 = US$5, I made a mental calculation error, I guess this is a good example of how easy it is to screw up. But also how important it is to correct such mistakes. Even though I'm solely representing myself and not any company, I was on a walk with my cat at the time and came home urgently when I realised I had made a mistake. Anyway sorry for any confusion caused. I have corrected this transparently above since it seems strikeout doesn't work with this boards BBCode so I wasn't sure how to fix it without causing more confusion if I didn't do it transparently.
