Steam regional pricing means a game can cost a different amount in each country. The developer sets those prices, and Valve's tools can suggest them. You pay the price for the country you live in. Steam's own rules forbid using a VPN or proxy to change that.
This page is built from Valve's own papers, read on 11 October 2026. We did not collect store prices, and the last section says why.
How a Steam price is set
Valve's docs for developers put it plainly: "The price for each product on Steam is specified and displayed using 37 different currencies and 4 region groups."
The next line matters more: "As always, how you choose to enter prices for your game is entirely up to you."
Valve's tools offer three ways to turn a US dollar price into a suggestion:
- Exchange rate only: "a simple currency exchange rate at the time indicated".
- Purchasing power only: data "about the purchasing power of customers" in each country.
- Several factors: buying power, "the expected cost of comparable entertainment goods" and the exchange rate.
The developer can take a suggestion or type in its own price. So two games at the same US price can cost very different amounts elsewhere.
Which countries get which price
There are three cases.
A local currency. We counted the currency table on Valve's public page: 37 currencies, all in use. They run from the Brazilian real and the Indian rupee to the tenge and the hryvnia.
A regional dollar price. Where Steam has no local currency, a developer "may still offer a different, usually discounted, USD price". Valve names four groups, 41 countries in all:
- USD_CIS, 9 countries, among them Armenia, Belarus, Georgia and Uzbekistan.
- USD_LATAM, 13, among them Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela.
- USD_MENA, 14, among them Egypt, Morocco, Turkey and Iraq.
- USD_SASIA, 5: Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.
Plain dollars or euros. Everywhere else, prices are "charged in US dollars". The one exception is Europe, "where the Euro is used instead".
What Steam's rules say about VPNs and proxies
We read the Steam Subscriber Agreement on our server. It was last updated on 10 September 2026:
The rule is wider than some guides say. It covers hiding where you live "to order or purchase at pricing not applicable to your geography". It also covers doing so "for any other purpose".
The result is spelled out too: "Valve may terminate your access to your Account." A cheaper price bought this way can cost the whole account, with every game in it.
Region locks in the EU
Steam's region rules have been to court in Europe. In January 2021 the European Commission fined Valve and five publishers €7.8 million for "geo-blocking". Valve's share was €1,624,000.
The case was about Steam keys. Valve offered publishers "a territory control function", which let them block a key outside chosen countries. The EU found that they "restricted cross-border sales" of games by where the buyers were.
The games in that case were sold as keys "by third party distributors across the EEA". The decision was about those keys, not the prices in Steam's own store.
Which Steam region is cheapest?
That depends on the game, because each developer sets its own prices. We did not collect store prices, for three reasons:
- Steam's rules forbid "scripts, bots, macros, or other non-human-controlled systems" that interact with Steam "in any manner".
- The official Steam Web API needs a key tied to a named app, and we did not register one.
- Valve's price explorer opens without a login, but it is marked "Valve Confidential". We did not use it.
To see a game's price for your own country, open its store page. For prices around the world, our guide to dynamic pricing shows one app whose price varied 22 times across 23 App Store countries.
Where a proxy fits
It does not fit here. A proxy changes the address a site sees, and Steam's rules forbid using one to hide where you live, for any purpose. Why a site's terms matter more than what a proxy can do is the subject of our page on whether web scraping is legal.
What this page could not check
- We collected no store prices, so we cannot name the cheapest region for a given game.
- Steam Support's rules for changing your store country sit behind a sign-in, and we did not read them.
- Valve changes its currencies, region groups and rules from time to time.
- We will read these papers again by 11 January 2027.
Sources
- Steam Subscriber Agreement, last updated 10 September 2026: store.steampowered.com.
- Steamworks docs, Pricing, read 11 October 2026: partner.steamgames.com.
- Steamworks docs, Supported Currencies, read 11 October 2026: partner.steamgames.com.
- Steam Web API Terms of Use, read 11 October 2026: steamcommunity.com.
- European Commission, press release IP/21/170, 20 January 2021: ec.europa.eu.
- Our own reading on our server, 11 October 2026: read_sources.py and ssa_lines.py at 21:32 UTC.
