Steam is now pricing games in Europe and United kingdom using respectively euros and pounds. Another major change is that the VAT in now included in the price, and not hidden until you pay for your game. So I went on the Steam Store to check the new prices by myself. At first I was pretty mad to see that many of my favorite games suffered from the "magical conversion" (stating that 1 dollar is worth 1 euro), overpricing some games by about 25%. Which is very not OK since it's digital distribution (you can sometimes find non-digital copies of a game on the net for less than the digital one on Steam). But I could only compare prices of games I already bought and of which I knew the price in dollars. Now the website only shows new prices and makes it difficult to achieve a global comparison.

According to Rock Paper Shotgun, this change brings also very good news among the bad ones.

Right now there’s some odd prices up there. Bioshock is currently £13.99. On the US Steam it’s at a mystifying $54.99. Which when bought at UK prices, with tax, would be £42.38. That’s a mysterious saving of over £28. Er, blimey. The Complete Pack for Civ IV is a whopping $59.99 for Americans. That would have been £46.21 for us. It’s £26.99 on the EU beta. Even some brand new games, like GTA 4, have notable savings. US converted price: £30.80. EU price: £26.99. And the complete publisher packs are currently insanely cheap. Fire sale prices.

But they only study the new prices in pounds. If you get any information about the prices in euros, please comment about it.

Edit: All this things also raise the question of "what are they doing with the taxes?". I mean, it's only 8% in the United States, but many times more in Europe. So are they paying the taxes to the country the client is from? Or to the USA? Please bring us some lights on this if you have any.