Valve decides that Europeans don’t get screwed over enough when they buy games

A large number of European consumers have become outraged over a recent decision by Valve to start listing Steam prices in Euros for everyone in the EU (previously, everything was in US dollars). While this seems reasonable, the outrage is because the currency exchange rate Valve is using is $1 = €1, while the actual exchange rate is something close to $1 = €0.72. To make matters worse, Valve is forcing a flat VAT into the price, even in countries that don’t have a VAT or use a lower rate.

With this change, almost everyone in the EU has found that Steam games are drastically more expensive than they used to be, and are understandably pretty upset about it. A Steam community group protesting the change already has around 3,000 members, and that number is getting bigger rather quickly.

So far, Valve’s only response has been to claim that the change was mainly made to make things “easier to understand” for Europeans so that they “wouldn’t be surprised” by taxes. Oh, and they also realized that since European game stores charge so much anyway, they could raise their prices and still be competitive.

As much as I love Valve, this is pretty crappy. Hopefully they realize that this is unfair and decide to use a proper exchange rate.

[Thanks, Martin!]