Valve has quietly rolled out changes to Steam’s gifting policy and removed one of the biggest frustrations many had with the old system. According to Steam’s most consumer friendly upd…
Any chance they can get rid of region-locked keys while they’re at it? I hate seeing deals on games I want just to find out I can’t activate it where I’m living.
I doubt it, because that would bring back VPN deal tunnelling that Valve doesn’t want to endorse (because the regional discounts are meant to scale with the purchasing power of the citizens in each region, not for people from the west going on gray market sites to grab games from Ukraine/Russia/Brazil/Argentina).
That is incorrect, even though it was written as such in the article. According to the Valve source they point to, the gift’scost is calculated at checkout based on the receiver’s region. You can gift to any other region, as long as the game is available there
No way, and please don’t. Region locked keys exist so that they support Regional Pricing, which makes it so that games are relatively priced based on the economy they are being sold to, a huge reason of why Steam “solved” the piracy issue of games on PC. It works the way it does so that people from those countries can have fair access, while people from a country with a better economy aren’t able to use a VPN or something like that to buy games for cheaper.
Any chance they can get rid of region-locked keys while they’re at it? I hate seeing deals on games I want just to find out I can’t activate it where I’m living.
I doubt it, because that would bring back VPN deal tunnelling that Valve doesn’t want to endorse (because the regional discounts are meant to scale with the purchasing power of the citizens in each region, not for people from the west going on gray market sites to grab games from Ukraine/Russia/Brazil/Argentina).
It specifically mentions that the receiver of the gift must be from the same region. So I would agree that this (probably rightfully) isn’t happening.
That is incorrect, even though it was written as such in the article. According to the Valve source they point to, the gift’scost is calculated at checkout based on the receiver’s region. You can gift to any other region, as long as the game is available there
That doesn’t apply retroactively to existing giftable games+keys though, I presume.
No way, and please don’t. Region locked keys exist so that they support Regional Pricing, which makes it so that games are relatively priced based on the economy they are being sold to, a huge reason of why Steam “solved” the piracy issue of games on PC. It works the way it does so that people from those countries can have fair access, while people from a country with a better economy aren’t able to use a VPN or something like that to buy games for cheaper.