Reports out of the Valve Software hosted Steam Dev Days conference in Seattle this week, indicate that the Steam service plans to soon expand its range of accepted currencies from countries around the world. A photo taken from a Dev Days presentation and Tweeted by attending developer Armin Ibrisagic of Sanctum 2's Coffee Stain Studios suggests that support for 12 new currencies is on the way, with both Australian and New Zealand dollars among the new additions.

Steam currently supports United States Dollars (USD), British Pounds (GBP), Russian Rubles (RUB), Brazilian Reais (BRL) and Euros (EUR), and the presentation slide indicates that during 2014 Valve plans to expand on that to also include Australian Dollars (AUD), Thailand Baht (THB), Canadian Dollars (CAD), Norwegian Krone (NOK), Mexican Pesos (MXN), New Zealand Dollars (NZD), Philippines Peso (PHP), Malaysia Ringgit (MYR), Indonesia Rupiah (IDR), Singapore Dollar (SGD) Ukraine Hryvna (UAH), and Japanese Yen (JPY). These currencies are of course on top of the multitude of payment methods now available on Steam, which depending on region includes a variety of credit cards, PayPal and WebMoney, etc.

It's difficult to speculate whether this will actually be a net positive for Australian Steam users, as although transacting in local currency should avoid conversion fees from local financial institutions, it will also somewhat obscure regional price markups between the US and Australian prices offered on the service, which have traditionally been very easy to compare while both in US dollar amounts.

Update: Had originally interpreted the pictured 'kr' as Korean Won, but a closer look at the map suggests it refers to the Norwegian Krona - sorry Koreans! Also note that Turkey is highlighted, but there's no mention of the Lira.