It is the most ridiculous in Indonesia, since they have gigantic denominations. They see that 28k block even more refined than you do. This is a very subtle approach for many countries with large-denomination currency to get somewhat better profit margins, albeit not by much.
And, as usual, us using the Euro are the most fucked in Steam store.
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A more informed reply -- I guess my screenshots probably aren't there anymore, since I cancelled that server (nm, still up as of now, but probably not soon)... but, the South Korea acct no longer had access to market, because the reason for its existence was it was 'global' region & many games in South Korea were a lot cheaper than US. Plus (like Norway) it had tons of stuff that was mispriced. Now there is a new gifting system + game must be within 10% of price, even for global regions.
re; gems -- no, you could buy tons of gems for about 5 cents USD less right now, if you know the right things to look at. if you want to buy stuff at ask and get cheaper, it's generally foil cards. but that isn't the way to go about it. something like south korea has huge advantage on placing the bids & receiving the stuff that way & no, you wouldn't get the gems for the same price as the sacks sell for, it'd be more akin to 30-40 cents per. You don't buy the stuff at ask, you place bids on thousands of things, inc. these 10, 20, 40 gem items that (a lot) of people can't place bids for at a competitive price. all those 10 or 20 gem 3 cent items that show 20+/24hr volume, but no bids? tons of bids, just not visible.
it'd be like this, but on a grander scale: http://cardinal.nogleg.com:2222/steam4.png -- those are 200 gems each
re: having an indonesia account - it's probably not necessary w/ the south korea one. would be interesting to be able to see the total picture, though. i suppose that is the cheapest currency? i guess to me that's a good enough reason & like the south korea acct, not like I'd be using it to buy things, just observe.
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30-40 cents starts already making sense, I just quickly glanced at the pictures and thought the savings would be much smaller. Like buying a gem sack for 50 cents instead of 55, you would either have to buy huge amounts for personal use or then figure a way to get some kind of profit out of that for it to worth the effort.
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I don't see why they'd have to do that. They make it so you can't withdraw form Steam to avoid all these tax complications and such, but because of this, it also makes it easy for them to have their 'own' currency.
Deposits could be converted into this point system, and regional pricing could be retained within the point system while making the community marketplace hold the same prices for all.
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The more regions they introduce the more market is divided. I think for long Russia had advantage here, right now India has weakest currency.
Also managing this doesn't always work properly, they make mistakes which can lead to interesting outcome:
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-05-01-steam-currency-conversion-error-made-a-gun-usd3-5m
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but you pay less taxes there
when you sell a card for 3c valve gets 66% of it
when you sell for 4c they get 50%
for 5c they still get 40%
for 6c they get 33%
that's really huge taxes
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I mean, the seller doesn't gain anything from those taxes either.
Also, we are talking about unlimited Valve-spawned items that give tax profit to valve.
Those 2 cents used to be divided in
Now you would think that a Valve thing would not coming from a game would require less taxes, right?
That's 2 times a 1 cent fee for Valve itself.
Now, this is not the right sale to critique as there must have been developers for the Saliens game and they need to be paid too (they may be extra staff, idk), but there were sales in which the "event" was "Go to the fucking discovery queue 3 times daily" and the fees on cards were exactly the same. The difference between those sales and now were the number of cards given.
More cards make the price decrease and the sales increase, that means less gain* for users and more gains for Valve.
*It starts as less gain per card, but it reflects on the total gain. Back in the day I could easily make 30c or more with 3 cards, now I'm lucky if I get 18c with 6 cards. Yes, cards were likely priced 12-15c each.
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You have it wrong.
Valve does not gain anything from those "taxes" as they already have your money long before you even buy anything on the steam market.
Those "taxes" only exist to withdraw Steam Wallet money from the market so that the value of the total wallet money in circulation has to be refilled with real money....otherwise it could happen that just the existing amount (in theory) would just circulate between the persons without generating more (as in buying wallet founds) and so the whole buy/sell "flow" could end at some point.
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Valve does not gain anything from those "taxes" as they already have your money long before you even buy anything on the steam market.
Yes they do. If you use Steam Wallet to buy a developer's game, Valve has to pay money to that developer. If the same percentage of your money is used up on market fees, Valve pocket it (and perhaps pay some of the fees out to developers, depending on what market items are transferred).
When you buy Steam Wallet, Valve have your money, but you have a claim in the same value towards whatever goods you wish to obtain. I'm sure in their accounting, Valve can't just declare all Steam Wallet funds money they already have full ownership of without any limitations, as people spending this Steam Wallet can cost Valve (real) money.
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Now, this is not the right sale to critique as there must have been developers for the Saliens game and they need to be paid too
You can rest assured Valve is swimming in so much money that they would have no way of spending even a notable amount of any form of development. Unless they start making a few GTA Vs, which they won't.
Back in the day I could easily make 30c or more with 3 cards, now I'm lucky if I get 18c with 6 cards. Yes, cards were likely priced 12-15c each.
That's because everyone and their mother now each have about ten farming accounts running ASF (or giant botnets running a fork of it). It's solely because of the amount of extra accounts farming free cards.
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Just to highlight the absurdity of how current Steam marketplace works;
(the first two were taken a day ago, price is a bit cheaper now)
http://cardinal.nogleg.com:2222/steam1.png <-- what it looks like from South Korea (spot price right now is 1119:1, rather than 1117:1)
http://cardinal.nogleg.com:2222/steam2.png <--- what it looks like from US side
http://cardinal.nogleg.com:2222/steam3.png <--- taken maybe 8 hrs later. the two spikes would be from buyers that are unfortunate enough to be located in an area with high value currency. the first bump would either be from GBP or Euro buyer w/ second either being Euros or USD.
current lowest ask on most cards is now around 0.0265 USD. obviously there are many uses for this phenomenon. one obvious one is this ability to place lowball bids on 10, 20, 40 gem items, and resell the gems for huge profit. there is near 'unlimited' amt of stuff you can buy off marketplace right now for about a $0.55 to 1000 gem ratio, and that's at the asking price. ofc the way to do it is to place the bid, then snatch the underpriced
.... and hence the reason why steam wallet balance needs to be converted into 'steampoints' or something similar. this would not impact regional pricing for games.
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