Quote Originally Posted by JunseiKei View Post
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Well, here's the thing... said prices are controlled by the game's publisher, not Valve. Square Enix dictates the prices for Brazil and Russia, and then ignored them for 5 years with no change. Might have been an oversight, but this oversight was what brought the Russian and Brazilian player base we have here.
Also do note that at least for the Brazilians, the previous price for FFXIV (around 29BRL) was already more expensive than the official prices for WoW in Brazil (23,90), and only a bit lower than the Russian price (550RUB), so it's not like it's unsustainable (...unless Square Enix screwed up beautifully in their infrastructure and are having to spend far more money per player).

Also other games also use this kind of regional pricing directly through Steam, Warframe being one of them. It's still an opt-in process though, since games like Elite Dangerous do not use regional pricing, and Warframe itself didn't support it at first, but later included regional pricing.

So yeah, despite this involving the Steam storefront, all prices were being regulated (or ignored) by Square Enix, and it was their decision to remove the regional pricing (one has only to look at the price of the base game: it still uses regional pricing in Brazil and Russia; the base game + Stormblood costs 105,99BRL, which is far less than the ~200BRL that would correspond to the pricetag of 60USD).

We hope that this overall shady behavior serves as a justification for Valve to weight in just like they did in NMS and Arkham Knight and allow for refunds; or at least poke Square Enix saying "Yo folks, you have an impending PR nightmare here on this side. Either authorize the refunds or do something about it".