Dev Log 433 - Seats Shenanigans

Good evening folks.

Well, that bug was annoying!

For those who missed it, we had a case where people in a bunch of countries were seeing prices for seats that were higher than the cost of the game! Something was clearly wrong.

What had happened was that, when asked, Steam would say that they were all using US dollars. That was *sort* of true, but also confusing as Steam has codes they use to talk about these countries.

If you look here...

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/pricing/currencies

... you'll see that they have USD_CIS, USD_LATAM, USD_MENA, and USD_SASIA. To me, it looked like those were the currency codes they used for those countries (just like in the table below that text).

But no, that is not the case. When our server asked Steam for the currency code, it would just return USD for those territories, and so we dutifully showed the prices for the United States.

The fix wasn't too bad. We simply started asking Steam for the country code as well and used that in combination with the currency code to determine if the player was in one of the USD_* categories.

With that we could show the intended prices[0]. What a palaver though!

Thanks again to the folks who were so quick to report and help us fix this.

It's late here in Norway, so I'm gonna get some sleep.

Have a good one.

Disclaimer: This DevLog is from the perspective of one developer. So it doesn’t reflect everything going on with the team

[0] This doesn't fix the issue that Steam has grouped together some countries that, to me at least, feel like they have far too disparate buying power, which really penalizes players there (Argentina is a good example)