Digital game prices differ substantially from one country to another. For publishers this is a pricing strategy; for analysts it is a data source. Observing regional prices is legitimate market research; permanently changing your store region , on the other hand, violates platform rules.
This article is about observing price data. Buying cheaply by circumventing regions ends in account termination and revocation of the content you bought. Platform policies on this are explicit.
Where the Price Gap Comes From
The gap comes from purchasing power parity and local tax rules. Publishers apply it deliberately.
Observation Method
To collect prices reliably, each region has to be observed in its own session. If cookies and account data get mixed, you will see the wrong currency and the wrong price.
Exchange-rate swings make data collected on different days incomparable. Record the rate next to every entry.
Technical Notes
- Store pages are largely rendered with JavaScript, so a headless browser may be required.
Accept-Languageand keep the region cookie consistent with the IP's country.- Match the same product across regions by the store's product ID (app id); matching by name is unreliable.
- Keep the request rate low; store APIs are rate limited.
Data Model
Don't convert the price to TRY before storing it; keep the raw data and convert at query time.
For the complete price-monitoring stack, see price comparison proxy, for country selection our location list and for the collection architecture, see web scraping proxy pages.