Steam to add support for 12 new currencies in 2014

Steam Dev Days is well underway, and although the press wasn't invited to the party, they can't stop us from pressing our ears up against the window trying to catch snippets of what's being said. Hey, it's a living. The latest snippet came in the form of a sneaky tweet from Coffee Stain Studios' Armin Ibrisagic, whose captured slideshow image reveals that Valve is planning to add support for a bunch of new currencies to Steam sometime this year. The Australian, Canadian and New Zealand dollars appear to be included, as do the Japanese yen, the Mexican peso and the Singaporean dollar. Metro 2033's bullet-based currency is notable by its absence.

It's hard to tell yet whether this will have a positive or negative effect on the often dramatic gap between game prices in the US and UK and those in, for example, Australia. As VG247 note, while the move should eliminate exchange rates and conversion fees, it will make it more difficult to check whether a game's price has been jacked up by its publisher.

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Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.