Steam’s Autumn Sale has begun, but Aussies are missing out big time

Edit: Some games listed in the article have returned for sale since originally writing. Many still remain non-purchasable.

Steam’s Autumn Sale has begun with deep discounts across the huge library of titles found on the Steam storefront. With the Autumn Sale (which actually takes place in Spring here in Australia) also comes The Steam Awards, allowing  users to nominate and vote on their favourite games from 2018 across multiple categories.

Whilst this is usually an exciting time of the year for PC gamers, Aussies are being royally screwed at the moment. Just yesterday Steam begun supporting the Australia dollar. This means we now view games in our own regional pricing rather than seeing games in USD and needing to convert. This is awesome in theory, but the reality is a much more unfortunate outcome. As of current, huge swaths of Steam’s library are inaccessible to Australian gamers. If a developer / publisher didn’t set a regional price for Aussies previous to the AUD support, then we simply can not buy those games.

The list of missing games is far too big to print in its entirety, but there are definitely some noticeable omissions. Releases as recent as Return of the Obra Dinn are missing, as is 2018 Game of the Year nominee Celeste. Huge Checkpoint favourites such as Dream Daddy, INSIDE, Into the Breach, Firewatch, Warhammer: Vermintide 2, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, Cuphead, and Donut County aren’t purchasable either.

Also missing are Binding of Isaac, Assassin’s Creed 2, the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series, FTL: Faster Than Light, Night in the Woods, Torment: Tides of Numenera, Outlast 1 & 2, and The Witness.

In fact, entire catalogues of games from certain publishers aren’t purchasable here in Australia. Konami games aren’t available, nor are games from Microsoft Studios or Daedelic.

The list of games that are missing is huge and stretches far beyond the aforementioned games. Publishers were sent emails in the lead up to the conversion to AUD prompting them to set a regional price for Aussie players. Clearly many publishers completed that process, but many others haven’t. This isn’t something new either with the same situation occurring in other regions as Steam begun incorporating their local currency. Thankfully in those other regions, the publishers finally begun catching up and those games returned to sale.

How long it will take for these publishers to incorporate a local price we can’t say, but with enough attention from angry Aussie gamers, it hopefully won’t be too long. It’s just so unfortunate this process arrives at the start of a huge sale.