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Steam adds Australian dollar and has completely and utterly broken the store.
- Thread starter SuperBanana
- Start date
Wonder how many of those indies are out of business? Runic still exists but the actual Runic games got closed and what was left was folded into the parent company I believe, could explain the problem. And Konami is Konami, they give fuck all which is no surprise to anyone.
If indies go out of business, I guess someone else is responsible for maintaining the store page on Steam? I mean, someone gets your money if you buy these games today, right? :)
Yup, we got a notice to add AUD to all of our games, but it doesn't surprise me that a bunch of publishers forgot to. It was an announcement in Steamworks, and if as a company you're not logging in regularly (which you might not if you don't have games coming out), you may never know you're supposed to.
Isn't there an option to receive mails or text messages when there's a new announcement in Steamworks?
They usually send out emails regularly regarding changes such as this as well, so if someone isn't monitoring the email used for the steamworks developer account they might not see it. But it seems like an email you'd want to keep an eye on??
Yep, there was an email sent out a long time ago as well as others, including as recently as two days ago.
Yep, there was an email sent out a long time ago as well as others, including as recently as two days ago.
It really sucks and especially as there's a sale going. Sure, they'll fix it. But why go about it in this hamfisted way in the first place? You'd think they'd have made sure a bunch of devs ticked a box that confirmed they were good to go, held off until it reached the majority of them, or have an alternative in place in case no response was given.
That's very odd. Which country are you located in? FYI, DDDA does not have any country restriction whatsoever, at least from our end. Only Germany is restricted for Dead Rising.
Are there any other games you noticed that aren't purchaseable?
This could be a bug on Steam's end.
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Dead Rising and Dragon's Dogma are unavailable in Kazakhstan (for DR it's the only country to be marked as "N/A").
Mails were also sent out. And a bunch of those who forgot have set sales prices everywhere else for this sale, so they have logged on to Steamworks too
On the plus side, a lot of Ubisoft's back catalogue are now much much cheaper (almost 50%) and heaps of devs have decided USD$1 = $AUD1 so like a 27% saving or so there.
Same thing happened when they added the original regional pricing. At least it did for me, in South Africa.
Everyday Steam seems more and more pathetic of a service but the other options aren't great either.
GOG is pro GG/transphobic and itch.io, while amazing, has a fraction of Steam's user base.
GOG is pro GG/transphobic and itch.io, while amazing, has a fraction of Steam's user base.
User Warned - Thread Derailment
Yeah, Steam blows. Their 30% cut means they should take care of this.
Based on the information in this thread I would like to express the opinion that your previous post blows, not Steam. Publishers and developers have known for months that the currency will be introduced, Valve sent them multiple notifications and some of them neglected to act.
Again, did you read this thread?
Please tell me what they should've done in this case. What's "taking care of this"?
Some of these prices are just stupid, really hope it gets sorted, but if not, it shouldn't stop us buying US keys and activating them, right?
Oh, so this explains why there was no price or purchase button listed when I was browsing steam earlier!
Really hoping they can get it fixed soon.
Really hoping they can get it fixed soon.
You have no idea what this is about, do you?
Just dropping the usual
BuT sTeAm TaKeS a 30% CuT
shitpost
Well in the specific example I mentioned, I was wondering maybe when Runic was around they used a different email or people to handle this stuff then but when they got folded there was no one to look after old Runic's affairs. I think Perfect World in the parent company or publisher, don't what they are up to now or if they have anything else on Steam that is having the same price issue.
I'm not sure about the new shipping tax, but IIRC all transactions on PSN/XBL include our 10% GST, so I'm assuming Steam publishers might be working around that.
(For international people, our tax is traditionally included in the price - not added to the end at checkout.)
What's the benefit of doing this? Didn't Steam display the prices in AUD before? I'm fairly certain it did, it shows NZD if you're in New Zealand
You're right - it has "VAT @ 10%". I wonder if there's an Australian legal difference between VAT and GST? It'd be interesting to see if new games change it to GST.
No, it was definitely still in USD for Australia. You could go and buy a $20AU prepaid card at your local store and it would convert to the US currency rate when you typed it in. I bought Obra Dinn the other week for $US19.99, and it's now showing at $AU28.95.
At least that title would've spelled 'Australian' properly. As it is, the thread title is a little bit ironic. (Or multi-layered?)
Don't know, I assumed they used VAT as just a catchall for sales tax. VAT is currently 17.5% so Valve clearly knows the correct amount of sales tax, 10%, to charge Australians. Just bought something, first game since the changeover and it still mentions VAT.
I can see both sides of this issue. They forgot to let us know that submitting for these price changes would not disqualify us from two, possibly three, huge sales. Forgot as in, Valve seems to think that they don't need to tell developers everything. I had to email them asking what was up. So, a lot of devs probably didn't do anything out of fear that they would be locked out of Halloween through Winter sales.
It's not an excuse for developers and publishers not to be proactive about this issue, though.
There's also this.
I'm 100% cool with the cut they take.
How is it that Valve was able to previously sell these games in Australia, then?
That's odd. I did and my app is just a "test app" that I bought so I'd have access to the site; I've never actually submitted anything for review, let alone released a product.
The pricing matrix is split into three sections: Currency, Region-specific prices, and Country-specific prices. The latter two allow publishers to set prices USD prices for territories that lack local currency support.
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So dumb. Why don't they just put in a clause that says "if we don't hear from you, we're just going to do a straight currency conversion from USD at whatever the exchange rate is that week "
It might have been a hyperbolic way to put it, but if a store doesn't allow you to buy most of its stuff, it isn't really a properly working store.
When Steam added polish zloty I don't remember there being an issue at all, strange that this did for a stronger currency.
I'm not sure. Perhaps because too many devs/publishers wouldn't bother to set correct regional prices if Valve did that. Or some people are claiming that Valve isn't legally allowed to do that.
As a Steam developer, they emailed me multiple times warning me if I didn't give Australian Dollar prices, it'd be delisted in Australia until I did. They let people know a month in advance, then a week in advance, then a day in advance, and approved the prices I sent quickly.
I'm assuming there's some bigger reason for the delisting (since the other added currencies haven't had the same issue), but I don't really blame Valve for certain developers not doing something that would've taken two seconds and they warned multiple times about. And if they fix it now, Valve usually approves prices of new currencies super quickly.
I'm assuming there's some bigger reason for the delisting (since the other added currencies haven't had the same issue), but I don't really blame Valve for certain developers not doing something that would've taken two seconds and they warned multiple times about. And if they fix it now, Valve usually approves prices of new currencies super quickly.
Are your games on console as well? How do MS and Sony handle different currencies?
It's how Valve's always handled currency changes. E.g. From last year's reminder e-mail concerning the impending addition of the Argentinian peso, Costa Rican colon, etc.:
Since AUD wasn't part of a batch, I suspect many developers/publishers just kept kicking the can down the road as they didn't feel that updating their prices for a single country and relatively small market was worth prioritising.
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So, it really seems to me that if a publisher doesn't specify a "currency", price, Steam should default to the USD price. Obviously Valve didn't write their contract that way and it's a bit late to change now, but this definately seems like a problem Valve could have avoided. The current outcome does not benefit anyone.
Yeah, Nded suggested the same thing on the first page, and I certainly agree it'd be a better way to handle things. Product availability would be unaffected and there would be no legal wrinkles to be mindful of vis-a-vis pricing as it wouldn't be changing. There would be the matter of customer confusion, of course, but that could be mitigated by, say, also displaying an approximate converted price, noting on the cart and payment confirmation pages that the listed price is in USD (not unlike the existing warnings regarding regional restrictions and refund ineligibility), and requiring USD and local currency items to be purchased independently of one another. Additionally, periodical reminders could be sent to publishers with products still set to USD recommending that they update the prices to their local currency equivalents. Maybe even make it mandatory: if someone with sufficient permissions to update pricing logs into the Steamworks site, force them to complete the pricing matrix before allowing them to do anything else. Launched a game but forgot to include the executable? Oh well. Take 10 seconds to input a number and click a button.
Changing the current policy would probably be no small amount of work, but it'd solve some big headaches.
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