Publishers charge €1 for every $1 — your discount comes from the key resellers
Measured 2026-09-16 across 32,453 PC games priced in both euros and US dollars on the same day. By playze.io.
Across the catalogue the median official euro price is exactly 1.0000 times the American dollar price. Not roughly — the dollar figure is carried straight across to the euro sign, and then 21% VAT goes on top. A buyer paying official prices therefore pays 15.4% more than an American for the same game.
And yet the price actually paid is level with America: +0.1%. Every point of that difference is closed by key resellers rather than by publishers. Before tax it makes the eurozone the cheapest of the three markets we compare here — better than Britain — but the saving is the grey market's doing, not a regional price.
The numbers
| Against the US price | As charged | Before VAT |
|---|---|---|
| Eurozone, cheapest offer | +0.1% | −17.2% |
| Eurozone, official stores only | +15.4% | −4.7% |
| UK, cheapest offer | +7.2% | −10.6% |
| UK, official stores only | +15.7% | −3.6% |
VAT: 21% in the Netherlands, 20% in Britain, none federally in the United States.
Ignore the headline conversion
"+0.1%" and "+15.4%" both move with the exchange rate while the prices behind them sit still. The figures below are ratios computed inside one currency, or ratios of two ratios, which is why they are the ones worth quoting. The euro-dollar parity finding in particular is rate-free: it is a comparison of two numbers, not a conversion.
It holds across the catalogue
| Steam reviews | Games | Eurozone before VAT | UK before VAT |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10,000 and over | 1,671 | −18.4% | −16.7% |
| 1,000 – 10,000 | 5,761 | −18.3% | −15.5% |
| 200 – 1,000 | 10,025 | −17.2% | −11.0% |
| 50 – 200 | 14,996 | −9.9% | −6.6% |
The eurozone is ahead of Britain in every band — and both collapse toward the American price on the smallest games, where nobody bothers with regional pricing at all.
Where the saving comes from
Key resellers cover 53.2% of the games we track in euros, and on a typical game the cheapest key sits 54.2% below that game's official euro price. That is the whole mechanism: the publishers hold parity, the resellers do the discounting, and the buyer's saving depends on whether a given title has a reseller at all.
The comparison worth making is with Poland, which sits in the same Europe and does not get this: Polish buyers keep about half of Britain's pre-tax discount and almost none of it at official stores. That study is here.
Method
Every game is compared to itself: a median euro price against a median dollar price would compare two different baskets, so a game missing a price on either side is excluded. The population is non-free games with at least 50 Steam reviews priced in both currencies on the same day — 32,453 for the eurozone, 32,331 for Britain. The measure is the median of each game's local-price-per-dollar ratio, so it stays free of any exchange rate until the final step.
We price the eurozone, not the Netherlands — one euro price serves the currency union. What is Dutch here is the VAT rate, 21%, which is what a buyer in the Netherlands actually pays on top. Conversion uses the European Central Bank euro reference rates for 2026-09-16: 1 USD = 0.8668 EUR = 0.7432 GBP.
Prices are the cheapest offer we track across official stores and key resellers, except where a row says "official", which excludes resellers. Definitions on our methodology page; today's live figures for all five currencies on the regional price study.
Using these figures
Quote them freely with a link to this page. If you want a cut we have not published — a single publisher, a month-by-month series, another country — ask and we will run it. Get in touch.