Polish players keep half the discount British players get

Measured 2026-09-16 across 32,009 PC games priced in both Polish zloty and US dollars on the same day. By playze.io.

European PC game prices are usually lower than American ones before tax — that is the normal shape of regional pricing. Britain gets that discount. Poland gets about half of it, and on official store prices Poland gets almost none: a Polish buyer pays approximately the American dollar price with 23% VAT added on top.

First: ignore the headline number

"Poland pays 21% more" is the figure that travels, and it is unstable. Over the ninety days to 2026-09-16 the zloty moved 3.4% against the dollar, so the identical measured basket converts to anything between +15.6% and +19.5% depending only on which day you run it. Every figure below is a ratio of two ratios instead, which cancels most of that.

VAT explains the headline, then stops explaining

Poland charges 23% VAT, Britain 20%, and the United States has no federal sales tax. Three points of VAT do not explain a gap of nine.

It holds across the whole catalogue

Not an artefact of which games were sampled. The same halving appears in every band of popularity, from the biggest releases to titles with fifty reviews.

A second pattern worth noting: the smaller the game, the less regional pricing anyone gets. Below 200 reviews, Polish buyers pay within 3% of the American pre-tax price.

The keyshops do not close it

Poland is not short of grey-market sellers. Key resellers cover 50.5% of the games we track there against 51.8% in Britain — effectively the same. They discount less, though, on both ways of counting it. On a typical game the cheapest Polish key sits 50.8% below that game's official Polish price, against 56.4% in Britain; and comparing the two market-wide medians, Poland's cheapest price is 3.8% under its official median where Britain's is 7.4% under. The second market exists and is consistently the less competitive of the two.

Which publishers, specifically

Publishers with at least 60 games priced in both countries, ordered by how much better Britain is treated. These are medians across each publisher's catalogue, not single titles.

Artifex Mundi, at the top of that list, is itself a Polish publisher, listed in Warsaw. Across the 74 of its games we price in both countries, the median British buyer pays 16.3% below the American pre-tax price and the median Polish buyer 1.9% below.

Method

Every game is compared to itself. A median Polish price against a median American price would compare two different baskets, so a game missing a price on either side is excluded rather than quietly averaged in. The population is non-free games with at least 50 Steam reviews, priced in both the local currency and dollars on the same day: 32,009 games for Poland, 32,322 for Britain.

The measure is the median of each game's local-price-per-dollar ratio, which stays free of any exchange rate until the final step. Conversion uses the European Central Bank euro reference rates for 2026-09-16 — 1 USD = 3.7681 PLN = 0.7432 GBP — and VAT is removed at the statutory rate for each country. Note that a median of ratios is not the ratio of medians; the two answer different questions and we publish the first.

Prices are the cheapest offer we track across official stores and key resellers, except where a row says "official", which excludes resellers. Full definitions are on our methodology page, today's live figures for all five currencies are on the regional price study, and the eurozone — which does far better than Poland, though only because of its key resellers — is measured here.