Aussie Steam pricing is now enabled on the popular PC gaming marketplace, and gamers are finding that games suddenly cost a lost more than they used to.
According to a source with products on Steam, the price disparity can be chalked up to unfair pricing suggested by Valve.
“I’ve noticed that pricing for Australia is way higher than Canada or New Zealand even though they are pretty much at dollar parity,” the developer told Stevivor.
“The way it works is you set a price in USD and Steam automatically gives it a price in other currencies. You can manually change it, but I haven’t,” the source continued. “There will be a sudden price hike for Australian Steam customers… unless developers manually change the price.”
As an example, one of the source’s titles, a game listed at $9.99 USD, was automatically suggested to be priced at $11.49 CAD, $14.50 AUD and $12.39 NZD. At the time of writing, $1 Australian dollar was equivalent to $0.96 Canadian dollars and $1.06 New Zealand dollars.
In short, it currently sucks to be an Australian.
Kotaku notes that some triple-A titles launched with relatively competitive Aussie pricing, but those prices have increased as the day has passed. It’s unclear as to why Aussie pricing on games such as Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey was raised, mid-day, but we’ll report back as we learn more.
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