Valve is holding its own conference Dev Days this week; and, unfortunately for everyone, there is no live stream and no press is allowed at the event. It is strictly for gaming developers. But that hasn’t stopped many from trickling out information from the keynote – including this plan to introduce new currencies for Steam.
While Steam is available for most countries, it currently accepts as payment the Euro, US Dollar, British Pound, Russian Rubles, and the Brazilian Reais. For many Australian gamers, this required you to convert from US dollars to Australian dollars via credit card or PayPal – which attracts conversion fees.
That won’t be the case any more as Steam will soon let you pay in 12 currencies, most from the Asia Pacific region: the Australian Dollar, the Canadian Dollar, the New Zealand Dollar, the Singaporean Dollar, the Japanese Yen, the Thai Baht, the South Korean Won, the Mexican Pesos, the Philippines Peso, the Malaysian Ringgit, the Indonesian Rupiah, and the Ukrainian Hryvna.
However, this does mean that games will have a fixed price now – so you won’t be able to take advantage of the high exchange rate like many consumers had done when the Australian Dollar was on parity with the US Dollar. What the markup will be is unknown at that time, but hopefully it won’t be like the massive markup we see between US prices and Australian prices for console games.
Image: Tiny Build Games/Twitter