"Gamedev here. This is NOT normal. I suspect a bug happened on Valve’s side.
EDIT: checked our Steam email again: “If you do not add a USD price to these columns for your game before November 20th, we will default to the standard USD pricing you already have in Steamworks.”, seems like manual input was explicitly needed after all, but I’m not the only dev who missed it apparently.
Here’s a summary of what happened:
Last month, Steam notified all devs and publishers of the price change
Steam automatically suggested prices for LATAM and MENA (mostly half the USA price)
Through the Steam pricing tool, devs can manually override the suggestion with another price
We manually lowered the price to our 2nd game, but let Steam decide for our 1st game ($12.49)
Come today, and through Steamdb, we see that Steam did NOT apply its own suggested price for our 1st game. Instead it applied USA price (24.99). We still see the halved, Steam-suggested $12.49 price in our pricing tool.
Game developers are now discovering this and are hurriedly manually changing the prices to make it fairer to LATAM and MENA regions. We just did that and are waiting for Valve to approve the change.
I promise that outside of AAA publishers like EA, almost no game developer wanted this to happen. We’re aware that this is counter-intuitive and we know it won’t help with sales (or our reputation) at all."
From u/fablegrimoire,
"Gamedev here. This is NOT normal. I suspect a bug happened on Valve’s side.
EDIT: checked our Steam email again: “If you do not add a USD price to these columns for your game before November 20th, we will default to the standard USD pricing you already have in Steamworks.”, seems like manual input was explicitly needed after all, but I’m not the only dev who missed it apparently.
Here’s a summary of what happened:
Game developers are now discovering this and are hurriedly manually changing the prices to make it fairer to LATAM and MENA regions. We just did that and are waiting for Valve to approve the change.
I promise that outside of AAA publishers like EA, almost no game developer wanted this to happen. We’re aware that this is counter-intuitive and we know it won’t help with sales (or our reputation) at all."
Thanks for the clarification! It wouldn’t make sense for Valve to make a scummy move like this.