Valve finally clears up Steam game release dates, also adjusts pricing

Two important pieces of info today for both players and game developers, as it will affect both quite a bit with release date changes and pricing changes.

Firstly, prices! Valve announced to developers various updates to how they handle multi-currency. Developers and publishers are still free to set their own pricing but now Valve are giving developers a new tool to make it easier, along with adjusting their recommendation on prices across seemingly all currencies on Steam. This may result in price increases across many games on Steam in many different regions, as Valve said "with purchasing power and foreign exchange rates constantly evolving, we needed to make significant changes to those conversion recommendations to stay current".

SteamDB, as always, keep tracking changes on Steam and did their own blog post to highlight the changes. According to SteamDB the only currencies not changing have so far been CIS - U.S. Dollar, Costa Rican Colon. Israeli New Shekel, Kuwaiti Dinar, Singapore Dollar, South Asia - USD and U.A.E. Dirham. They included various tables, showing the changes against the dollar at various price points with this one showing just how big an increase it can be:

$59.99 USD difference:

Thanks SteamDB.

Another big change is how release dates are presented on Steam. Soon, gone will be the days of developers setting whatever format they wish for their dates, along with some including funny messages instead of an actual date. Instead, Valve will have a standard way to present dates that can be correctly formatted to your region so there will be no more confusion on days and months too.

Take Dwarf Fortress for example:

What is changing is that developers will need to put an exact date that only they and Valve can see, and then pick between these types of public views:

• The exact date. “Aug 24, 2023”
• Month-and-year. “August 2023”
• The quarter of the calendar year. “Q3 2023”
• The year. "2023"
• No date at all. “Coming Soon”

This change makes sense, and was a long time coming.

With this change, it will also affect how developers have their games shown in upcoming lists on Steam. Valve will position games "at the last possible date of that time range", so if developers pick to have just a month and year they will appear as if they select the last day in that month. Hopefully this will also help fix the issue of some developers repeatedly changing their date to keep bumping their game in the upcoming lists.