Comment by asksomeoneelse
4 hours ago
It doesn't seem to be just Steam. From what I see (from Switzerland), other online stores relying on PayPal seem to be impacted too. Though if the store let me try to use PayPal anyway, I can just switch the currency of the purchase to USD instead of using the currency of the credit card (CHF in my case), thus having my issuing bank do the currency conversion. It seems to work fine so far.
The timing of this problem is weird. Hard not to see a link with the recent troubles with Visa and Mastercard, even if Valve claims that it's not the case.
I wonder if this is actually more related to some EU lawmakers probing a few big online platforms for the abusive conversion rates they impose. Amazon is guilty of this, all the budget airlines are guilty of this, and so is PayPal.
They “offer” to charge your card in its native currency to avoid exchange rate fees, but they do so with an abusive exchange rate. They also always go out of their way to show the inverse exchange rate that nobody uses, and is hard to evaluate.
I just checked on Amazon, and they now display the “usual” exchange rate (still with an insane rate). So it definitely looks like something is getting tightened in the industry.