STEAMDB is saying April 24th

[Packrat]

Being purely digital, I don't imagine Steam has much in the way of distribution costs.

I'm fairly certain the publishers are the ones who set the prices, so no problem there.

Some Steam codes are indeed region-locked, but it doesn't seem to be a universal thing.

 

[satoru]

Does selling a game for $12.90 even cover Steams distribution costs? Do the developers have to agree to the price cut?
What about Steam game gifting? is it region-bound? I am sure Steam doesn't want my Russian friends buying and gifting me games, but they probably love me gifting them games.

http://store.steampowered.com/stats/content/

Steam's CDN through Akamai is so extensive and they push so much data in general they make up for it in sheer volume. They already need this giant network just to push out DOTA2/CSGO/PUBG updates. Everything else is basically 'background noise'.

As for the price, Steam's system basically works in that you set a price, usually in USD, andthen steam calculates the approrpiate price for each region. Since steam now supports nearly 30+ countries now, its pretty hard for most devs to know what to price a game in Russian Rubles, let alone figure out Indian Rupees, Brazilian Riels, etc. In countries with lower buying power, and traditionally more piracy, steam lowers the price of the game accordingly. This results in more sales from those regions than trying to price it to the USD price which would be out of reach for most people in that region. Of course regional pricing is not somethign Steam invented. Companies have used it for years. The 'grey market' of cameras and such in New York's Time Square is basically just regional pricing arbitage of buying them from lower priced regions, and selling it at a 'discount' in America.

Steam changed their gifting policy last year such that you can gift a game anywhere but only if the price differential is less than around 20% between you and the target country.

https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/1301948399254001159

The price differential between Russian and pretty much everywhere in the world is large enough to trigger the gifting restriction

 

[Chaon]

Here is something that you can take with a grain of salt.

 

[satoru]

Here is something that you can take with a grain of salt.

https://steamdb.info/app/637090/history/?changeid=U:6959929

I woudlnt honestly hold that much weight to that. Its essentially a free-text field of just 'whatever the hell you want'. Its likely just a place holder so that it shows up in the "Upcoming" section on Steam properly and ranked higher.

Once a more solid date comes out the store page and release date on steam will be adjusted accordingly.

I consider this more 'gaming steams upcoming section' than an actual release date

While this might have made an amusing April Fools Joke thing, I just checked, April 1 is a Sunday.

Steam DOES NOT release games on the weekends. Steam wants staff on hand to address any post release issues thus they do not release games over the weekend.

This makes the April 1 release date basically IMPOSSIBLE by Steam's own rules and thus should not be considered definitive.

Further proof that the field used there is just 'filler'.