Steam currency conversion error made a gun $3.5M
And nearly free to those using Indonesian rupiahs. Whoops!
Earlier today there was a currency conversion error on Steam that resulted in a Counter-Strike gun costing $3,549,383.07.
As spotted by Reddit, what happened was the exchange rate between the US dollar and the Indonesian Rupiah was mistakenly set at 1:1. In actuality, a US dollar is worth 13014 rupiahs.
As such, items on the Steam community market were over 13,000 times the price they should have been. Yikes!
Indonesian folks, however, were seeing their content was essentially free. So if an item cost $10, that would only come to 10 rupiah, i.e. 1/1300th of a dollar (or $0.0008 if you prefer decimals).
Valve naturally noticed the error immediately and issued a fix as well as rolled back all transactions on the community market.
"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," Valve explained in a statement on the Community Market. "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.
"Users using codes to add Indonesian Rupiahs to their Steam Wallets may have noticed that the wrong amount was added. These credits will be fixed later today."