Direct exchange rates ignore Purchasing Power Parity (PPP). PPP is how much a basket of goods costs locally. If $10 USD buys more in Country A than Country B, simply converting the price ($10 x exchange rate) makes your product too expensive in Country A relative to local wages and what people can afford. Regional pricing attempts to set a fair, competitive price in each market, maximizing global sales.

The Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) exchange rates are provided by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) which is itself based on the World Bank, OECD, and Eurostat data. The rates are updated twice a year when the IMF publishes its World Economic Outlook (WEO) report.

Although prices are the same across a shared currency region, the underlying local economies still differ. We first calculate a recommended price for each individual country based on its local purchasing power (using Netflix pricing or IMF PPP). Then, we combine these country prices into a single regional price by using Steam traffic data to weight them. This weighting gives more influence to countries with higher traffic, ensuring the final unified price reflects the most significant parts of your regional customer base. This approach also applies to unified non-local currency regions like USD_CIS, USD_LATAM, USD_MENA, and USD_SASIA.