This will apply to all digital services, including Steam, Origin, Uplay and others; steam is just marked as an example.
This is due to new EU legislation that takes effect the first January. The law basically means that steam and other services like origin, Uplay, Netflix, Spotify, Amazon and others are forced to pay taxes to the country where the user buys the product or service from instead of where their company is.
As a example, Valve S.a.r.l. has their HQ in Luxemburg where the taxes are 3% or even lower due to a tax agreement (for more info check out Luxleaks), now if I try to buy something from Denmark then valve will need to pay 25% tax, which gives them a lower profit margin and thereby a reason to set higher pricing even when EU1 is around 25% more expensive than US.
Due to the difference of the tax amounts in different countries this might also force valve to do more regions, where maybe some of them are only populated by 1 country, this might also make them add several other currencies they don’t use at the moment.
Finde out more here.
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Steam will most likely raise prices in Europe on the 1/1/2015 - 21 December 2014
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