Here is Valve explaining how regional pricing works and a guide they give developers to price their games accordingly. Anyway, in most cases the answer is simple: Those countries or regions have a lower income.
this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2026
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Steam singlehandedly diminished prevalence of piracy in some markets where it was overwhelmingly rampant before, by making it affordable to buy games compared to just downloading them from a torrents forum.
And just so it's clear, I'm not gonna pay fifty bucks for a game, because I can live two weeks on that.
Speaking as a South Asian and former school teacher (a middle-class person here, so to speak), our average salary goes anywhere from ~100$ to ~250$ a month. I could afford about 10=20$ worth of games every year, inflation dependant.
Note that this is in a culture where Piracy is the norm and actually buying games is practically unthinkable. If it weren't for Steam sales, wanting to support indie devs and not wanting to deal with bugs/cracks and updates for once, I wouldn't have ever 'bought' a game at all.
TLDR: Many South Asians cannot afford, much less think, of buying games. The lower prices mean some sales, instead of none.
Looks to be a combination of the cleanest (rounded) number for that currency, and how much are the people there willing to pay.
When you register a game with steamworks, most people put USD pricing and click a button that fills the rest. They have the data to roughly know how much 10 USD are in other regions, purchasing power adjusted.
Possible regional pricing based on CoL and purchasing power in those countries. People in countries that have lower purchasing power won't be able to afford those games if everything was priced universally in the USD equivalent.