Gaming
Steam Market Goes Through Currency Conversion Meltdown
If you woke up this morning to find the Steam Market closed, it’s because last night there was a major glitch with the store’s currency conversion rates for the Indonesian Rupiah. The results were some items being sold at millions of dollars while others were being sold for virtually nothing.
The glitch led to the conversion rate for USD and IDR (Indonesian Rupiah) to be set at 1:1. The actual rate of exchange is around 13,000 Rupiah to one US dollar, so you can see why this caused some problems. For example, an item being sold at $10 USD appeared to those using the Rupiah as their currency at 10 Rupiah, or $0.0008 USD. With cheap items on the Market suddenly becoming so cheap they were essentially free, many users took advantage of the mix-up by snatching up some “bargains”.
Conversely, sellers using the Rupiah as their currency had their items being sold at ridiculous prices in USD. An example was a Counter-Strike: Global Offensive weapon being sold for $3,549,383.07 USD, a tad higher than usual. Remember, 1 million Rupiah is only about $70 USD. Items like these were being sold for 13,000 times their actual price.
Valve quickly noticed the problem and closed the Market for a few hours. Unfortunately for the bargain hunters, they are also rolling back all the affected transactions. The company issued a statement on the Market once it reopened a few hours ago:
Early this morning, a problem with our currency exchange rate data allowed users who use Indonesian Rupiahs in their Steam wallet to make purchases on the Community Market at heavily discounted prices. We have reverted as many of these purchases as possible. Steam Trading and the Community Market were both disabled while this rollback process was occurring, but are now enabled once again.
A relatively small set of users have one or more transactions where the item was restored back to the seller, but the wallet funds have not yet been returned to the buyer. We are still working to resolve this issue and appreciate your patience while we sort everything out.
In addition to the market kerfuffle, there was also a problem with Steam Wallet. Users who used codes to add to their Wallet in Rupiah received the wrong amounts. Valve has not yet solved this issue, but has promised it will be “fixed later today.” They’re lucky they noticed the issue quickly. If it had gone on for too long, the company could have lost a huge amount of money.
Gaming
Ubisoft says that future Assassin’s Creed games will need more time to be made
As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.
Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”
You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.
Gaming
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP on PS5
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.
The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.
The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.
The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.
Gaming
This Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 zombies trailer is way too expensive
Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.
For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”
Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.
Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.
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