Ok, everyone. We came to concensus on this and decided to include the UK as well as the Eurozone stores in our update. New prices are making their way to the various regional stores as we speak. Some are up already, some may take until tomorrow to propogate/update. Read on more if you want to know the gory details, but know that this will be our international pricing policy for all DF published games on Steam (i.e. may not apply to DF developed games published by other companies on Steam) going forward.
The short version is that we've updated our prices in Euros and Pounds to more accurately reflect differences in currency values and taxes between the UK, US, and Eurozone countries. We decided to go with a formula that looks at the average exchange rate over the last year or two weighted a bit more towards the current rate (since most currencies fluctuate within a band) and the exitance of VAT in the UK and Eurozone (which does not exist for internet purchases in the US). Our forumula is the following:
US Dollars -> Euros/Pounds + 20% VAT (rounded to nearest 0.49 or 0.99) = Steam Store Price
As we all know, currency values fluctuate quite a bit, even within a single hour of a given day day. We will not be tracking the exchange rate exactly or updating our prices with every tick in the rate. We will evaluate our UK and EU prices periodically and will update them should we feel like rates have moved too far (in our favor or yours) from their current peg. We'll be doing this at our discretion and we have lots of work to do making games, so don't expect it to happen very often
We include VAT in our formula because it's deducted from the sales price before Steam takes their cut or we get paid. That means we need to factor it in to make an equivalent return on a given sale. Like currencies, VATs do change over time and differ from country to country. There are also some additional fees associated with currency conversion, so we just picked what felt like a nice round number that's a reasonable approximation of the VAT in various places and went with 20%.
We round to the nearest half Pound/Euro to keep the prices straightforward. Sometimes the rounding is in "our" favor, sometimes it's in "yours", but it's never more than a few cents/pence. We keep our prices ending in .49 or .99 because a century of sales data says that humans are wierd and strange and it's really the most effective way to price things even though it shouldn't be.
As I said before, these prices and policies will carry forward to any future DF games we are able to self-publish on Steam and will be the basis for any future sales on Stacking, CQ, Pnauts, etc. We decided to update them after the sale for clarity and fairness, as this way folks who bought during the sale still get a nice discount and folks who bought after get the exchange rate corrected prices and we don't have to deal with the signficant logistical issues of refunds, coupons, etc.
Anyway, I hope that explains things for everyone. As always, we're doing our best to listen to and do right by our awesome customers, fans, and community of players. Thanks!
Addendumn: The formula above applies to any pricepoint, but we generally sell our games at three price points in the US - $29.99, $14.99, and $9.99. The following is a nice "cheat sheet" for that.
Euros (based on 0.75 Euros to the Dollar which is the average from the last year or so)
$29.99 US = 22.50 Euros + 20% VAT = 26.99 Euros
$14.99 US = 11.25 Euros + 20% VAT = 13.49 Euros
$9.99 US = 7.49 Euros + 20% VAT = 8.99 Euros
Brittish Pounds Sterling (based on 0.64 Pounds to the Dollar which is the average from the last year or so)
$29.99 US = 19.19 Pounds + 20% VAT = 22.99 Pounds
$14.99 US = 9.59 Pounds + 20% VAT = 11.49 Pounds
$9.99 US = 6.39 Pounds + 20% VAT = 7.49 Pounds