A $1.36 game on Steam is being sold for 15,719 yen (roughly $136) in Japan [Update: Price fixed]

Written by. Ryuki Ishii based on the original Japanese article (original article’s publication date: 2022-03-07 17:01 JST)

[Update 2022/03/08 10:42 JST]
Dead Profit‘s Steam price has been updated to 157 yen. “Updated now, apologies it took a ‘,’ instead of a ‘.’ from exchange,” said the developer.

[Original Text 2022/03/07 19:51 JST]
A new clicker game called Dead Profit is sold for 15,719 yen (roughly $136) in Japan, and some users are confused by it. LayerQ, an influencer in Japan, reports. The game recently came out as an early access title on Steam for $1.36/£1.00, so the pricing in Japan is significantly higher than the intended price point.

Dead Profit is a clicker game where you play as a weapon supplier who provides magical items to parties involved in a war between Hell and the Above. Resources and item forging happens passively, and you have to optimize the process to make sure you have the right resources and the right amount needed to craft requested items.

As mentioned above, the game is being sold for $1.36 in the United States, which is around 156 yen. One Steam user noticed that the price is extremely high in some countries and made a post on Steam saying, “KR & JP The price is weird,” to which the developer Lamb replied, “I can have another look on full release, but I had it as £1 as i’m from the UK and just found the exchange.”

The game is priced at 162,720 won in South Korea (around $132) and 393,971 Colombian pesos (around $103) in Colombia. It’s expensive in other countries such as Kazakhstan and Vietnam as well. As you can see, the price is set unnaturally high in some parts of Asia and Latin America, likely due to miscalculation of exchange rates.

There’s a feature on Steam that developers can use to automatically convert the price to other currencies. If the developer had simply set the price to 1 British pound and automated the calculation, the game would have been sold at around the same price point. Instead, the developer likely did it manually, causing the price in some countries to go haywire.

The developer did say, “I can have another look on full release,” but the game is scheduled to release in January of 2023. It’ll be hard to consider buying the game in some countries if the price remains the same for that long, but those who are interested in Dead Profit can at least wishlist the game and wait for the price revision.