It makes me want to go Bah, Humbug. Really is bull**** when they change after purchase, and regional pricing sucks much of the time. Stop doubling the US prices for most other regions, and they would have less people going to traders.
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but that will cause ..problem isn;t it, since if you apply the price of US (for example) it will become too much for other region, and vice versa
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I'm not talking for all regions. But with something like CoD, why the hell is the local price 350% of the US price? Why are the Might and Magic games I want double the US price? There is no bloody reason for it, beyond filling their wallets more without any reason. There is no ****ing import costs like there is with the physical games I buy here (even though about 40% or more of the cost is just added without any reason).
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And so they can jump off a cliff.
I've come to the conclusion, that buying games for full price isn't always, if at all, smart. They either go 50%/75% OFF soon after being released or even get bundled. The only rare exception I'd make is, if I'm a total fanboy of a series and want the upcoming sequel. But even that can leave a bad taste, if you find out, that your hyped game turned out to be mediocre at best.
Many people nowadays either wait for big discounts, bundles or just pirate games. Mostly thanks to the welcoming and "totally not greedy" regional pricing policy.
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"I live in the U.S., so of course most other countries have better prices."
Whoaaa whoaaa, stop right there for a second...
UK, Europe, Australia and even Canada generally have prices anywhere from 25~50% and upwards HIGHER than the USD pricing on steam aswell as other sites.
Oh sure, some regions like Russia might get a better deal still - but don't go acting like US is always getting the short end of the stick. You already get releases earlier than the rest of the world and get favorable prices compared to many others aswell.
There is a reason why the $ =/= € topics exist, when translating prices they often simply switch the symbol.
$20 game gets sold for €20 // Thats 27.43 US Dollar according to the current exchange rate. EVEN when taking into account VAT (which is 21%) you don't get pricegap.
And there are many similar pricegaps for other currencies.
Try looking on http://www.steamprices.com/ - you will see that these price issues are not one-sided.
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Don't involve Canada in this, as we get the exact same price as the US. ;)
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I think this is a good thing now all the rushen users cant get mad profit from the other users of steam
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Let's make this clear. A digital video game where they can release and produce unlimited and countless amounts of it for the same price.
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Not quite sure if you are agreeing with me or what, but I look at it this way, if they sell 200 copies of a game priced at $60, they could easily sell around 1000 cheaper copies in the same amount of time. And as you said, they are digital keys so they can only profit from it.
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Don't kid yourself, they make us pay 60+ for pretty much any new game here in Australia. The only exception for me for new releases was Ys: Memories of Celceta came out at 45 AUD for the Vita. Thief will be 70-90 out of pocket next week (I think PS4 is 88 AUD but don't quote me). Tales of Symphonia Chronicles also out will be 89.95 for the standard edition, the collectors edition isn't available for purchase. Note I can buy a new copy of that PoS Duke Nukem Forever for 2 AUD for PS3, I can't recall how much it still is on Steam.
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That guy got banned because he had a Malaysian account and bought games on the Russian Store.
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He is talking about a key though. A key that was probably tagged since the beginning as a "RU" copy.
People who got ROW gift copies and activated it are able to preload without problems.
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No, it's not a key. I traded for a gift copy, actually Master Thief Edition, and it was ROW at the time. Now looking in my account info, it says as if it was RU/CIS, and it's still unusable.
EDIT - goddamn, why did I say key there? Anyways, my bad, but mine WAS a gift copy.
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Actually, THIEF gift copies purchased in the Russian store were not ROW. They had a RU tag in the database, but there was no mention of the lock in the gift copy description, and no IP lock was applied to them. The reason behind this was that it was impossible to purchase THIEF as a giftable copy in the Russian store without using an exploit. So after they found out about it and finally applied the regional restriction to it, all Russian copies of the game became unplayable outside our region.
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Pro tip that everyone should know since Borderlands 2 - when you open Steam in browser and hover over "add to cart" you can see subID. If you want to preorder something and those numbers are different in your-region and Russia, you MUST expect region-locks added in last hours.
Don't know if it was first, but for sure it was loudest when in day or two before release they finally announced Borderlands 2 bought in CIS will be region locked AND only playable in Russian language AND only with other Russian players. In that case people were saved because it turned out lots of CIS-players don't know Russian language and that pre-order received free ROW version along RU one.
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+1
I don't have a problem with restricting new purchases, but restricting already purchased items is a crappy move.
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If I buy something I expect to be able to play it wherever I want to, or if the case may be, gift it to whoever I want to.
So basically if something is region locked it's a no no for me. There are plenty of other stuff to get that are not region locked.
When it comes to steam well... just be carefull and read everything about the game you want so you don't get surpises as this one.
Just yesterday I saw a game that I would've liked to get but hey... only supported on Windows XP so... quite a fail there.
Quite a lot of people end up crying about stuff that was actually mentioned on the game page. Such as GFWL being included in a game they got.
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Or more. NZ / Aus have some crazy price increases on some titles. One of the CoD games is like 350% more.
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CoD MW2 89.99 USD in Australia vs 19.99 in the USA. There's also DLC that's got a 700% markup ie Anno 2070 - The Central Statistic Package that is 7.99 USD vs 0.99 in the USA. I could keep going, 2 times the USA's price is a common average, it's rare we get the better deal though it happens occasionally.
The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct is one of the rarities at 19.95 USD vs 49.99 in the USA.
Still also note the fact these prices are always USD not local dollars for us in Australia, the actual price I'd pay on TWD:SI is more like 22 AUD right now taking into account exchange rate surcharge.
www.steamprices.com is a great site to make use of if you're interested in the comparing regional pricings, they even have a top savings and ripoffs page (note I compare prices in Australia to the USA EU and Japan normally in the view of keeping better informed about the prevailing costs, some days it's cheaper for me to buy the console releases).
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^ this
region shit, IS THE SAME GAME why should i pay more then others for the same product?
And don't say because some have a better living because my country (Romania) is in tier2 zone while salaries here are very much close the Russian ones
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Well, it's not like buyers don't take advantage - paying $40 instead of $60 is profit. Both buyer and seller wins. But I guess publishers felt they lose too much - they only sell game for $20 instead of $60.
I only wonder how much they lose from people who won't buy it until it drops to $5 because they couldn't buy pre-order for those $40. I know I only buy new games if they go for less than $20, but if they are region locked I usually wait for $5, and that's $5 for GOTY edition.
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This. Will be just buying less games if more and more games get region locked.
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Region restrictions are great. Fucking love it. Everybody wins! What's not to like?
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same thing, i had to get it through trading, now im not sure if i'll be able ultra street fighter
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I have nothing against region restrictions. I'm actually totally neutral towards them, they can be both harmful and helpful at the same time, and neither are they more fair to everyone, nor are they more unfair. They're just an option.
Retroactive restrictions though, well, they make this thing a scam. Flat-out fucking scam, and it's as inexcusable as it can get. I'm in the same boat as you with THIEF, but I actually activated mine 2-3 months ago. By adding the region lock, they made my game unusable, and I've gotta say, I'm royally pissed about it. Hopefully they'll resort to the same solution that Ubisoft did with Creed 4 and other preorders.
If you want to region lock something, do it on day 1, or eat a bag of dicks. Valve should not allow these to happen, as from a legal standpoint, they're kinda sorta illegal. Just sayin.
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Hitting the preload button says "region locked" and won't advance. The game is unusable. Worst yet: I can't even revert the trade with my original trader (granted he'd be fine with that, which he's absolutely right not to be fine with as it's not his fault or anything) since it's already in my library. Ironically, THIEF stole my money.
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Yeah I think I'll have a word with him, thanks for the heads up about this. I didn't know about those workarounds, I thought these were legit ROW copies. Any idea about South Park being the same? I got a ROW preorder too, and while it's still showing up as ROW, anything could happen.
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question is, how much did you pay? if you paid something around 20$, it should be russian copy, which as far as i know turned to locked copies already. so i guess you paid more, and it's a brazil copy maybe?
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He listed it as some 27 dollars, but I paid in TF2 keys. It's definitely not a brazilian copy or south american one in general, since it says RU/CIS now in the account details.
EDIT - Goddammit, scratch that, I thought you asked about Thief there. Lemme look up SP's details.
EDIT2 - According to Google, he was selling it for 10 keys. I bought multiple stuff from him, that's why I didn't know for sure.
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thats too bad. really sorry for you. i activated mine immediately, and now i am so glad i did that.
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Nah I meant Thief there for whatever reason, I updated the post. My SP stays untagged as of yet, here's hooping it stays that way.
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hm, i wanted to have a look at your SP copy, but it seems you hid your gift inventory... ^^
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Nah, I already activated it on day one. My inventory is hidden? That's new... Lemme check if I can make it public.
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Greeaat. Last time I pre-ordered anything, period. Russian or not.
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This is a tough question.
Concerning the boundary you mentioned - nobody knows for sure. When Valve accuses a user of circumventing regional pricing/restrictions, they refer to the "no commercial use" clause of SSA. Which means you are not allowed to make profit reselling Steam games. It's been believed for a long time that Valve only bans traders who trade for real money, but recent months revealed that Valve is also actively opposing the usage of any other form of currency - namely, Steam wallet and in-game items. It is not known where the line between personal and commercial use lies in Valve's mind.
Concerning your case - there is a small chance that Valve is going to help you with the region lock if the support member who's handling your ticket sees that the inventory copy of the game you traded for did not have any mention of the region lock before. Whether or not they are going to take note of your trading history and consider it a violation of SSA, that I do not know for sure.
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I am Russian, and I really want to buy Jade Empire and The Longest Journey, I want to legally own these games and play them... but they are unavailable in our region. Why the hell?
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Good news is: you probably can get someone from Europe/US to get you steamgift and it will activate and work as intended (that's how I received Dark Messiah of Might and Magic when it was unavailable here).
Bad news: Jade Empire goes for around 600 rub. right now. The Longest Journey for around 400 rub. Even with sales it's probably much more then you'd pay if they were in your region.
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Thanks for the info. I didn't know that a game that can't be bought in some region can still be activated as a gift.
As for the bad news, well, I love these games, so if I have to pay more, so be it. They are worth every ruble.
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It's worth considering getting Jade Empire and The Longest Journey on GOG instead of Steam.
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Thanks. Overall, I prefer Steam over GOG. My plan is to buy and play all games that I really want to buy that are available on Steam and only then go grab the rest on GOG.
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lol. in the US you pay 45$ for Thief. whole europe has to pay more than 60$...
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what do you want to tell me with that link? ^^ this just proves what i said. and it would be better to choose us region on steamprices, so you can see that it is in fact 61$, what we have to pay here.
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And as a few guys can assure you, the income is not the same around europe... average salary in Portugal is around 600 to 700 € a month (minimum is about 485 €), if you compare that with english, german, french tell me how can we buy games that are 10 or 15% of our salary...... a AAA game on early days are about 2% maybe of an american regular salary ???
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yeah - depending on part of EU you will get from 120-150€ a month minimum wage in Romania/Bulgaria, through 300-400€ in central/eastern EU, up to 1500€ a month in Belgium, Netherlands or Ireland. For last countries residents 40€ game is 3% of their salary, while for Bulgarian it may be 33% of their salary. So much for sense behind regional pricing ;)
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Those region-restrictions just make me want to pirate the game more. The EU prices are just waaaaaay too expensive when they're not on sale and people just don't have 40€ for a game that will be 8 hours of gameplay. It's just not worth the money we can't always spend. That's why I trade with other people for tf2 items etc so I can get the game cheaper. If I were a developer I rather have 50 russians buying the game than it's on -75% sale or when people pirate it, but I think that's just me.
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Trading games is fine - circumventing the TOS by using a proxy is what gets you banned.
I agree that these rules and pricegaps are BS - especially when they change prices in one region but not in others.
HOWEVER saying that the US always gets the short end of the stick is a complete lie.
UK, EU, Australia and Canada often get worse deals by far.
Take a moment to look at http://www.steamprices.com/ - and look from the perspective of various countries.
You'll see that USD prices has prices which are better, anywhere from 2550% upwards to 100200% and some even higher in other currencies. The opposite exists aswell with some titles, I won't claim its one-sided. But the US definitely is not getting shafted on all sides.
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You're fine. Only the sellers get sanctions, and buyers only if they have a history of these problems requiring support to intervene. Whatever you do though, STAY AWAY FROM RUSSIAN PREORDERS! Wait until it's released and fully tagged everywhere. Why continue trading with them? Because they have the right to trade too. They do NOT have the right to resell though. Big difference.
That ties in with SleepyCat's comment on profits, where he means when Russians trade for something like TF2 keys at Russian pricing. Keys are considered currency, which is considered bypassing regional prices for them. But for other regions there are no restrictions for making profit from trades because it's typically not nearly as much. As long as you stick to trading and NOT reselling, it's all good. You can make profits without Russian prices (gasps!) and not have to worry about all of those broken politics anyway. They just need Valve to layout what's fine and what's not more clearly.
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I haven't really thought my answer through, but honestly I feel that steam is essentially a US store (I'm from Aus yet my prices are all in USD) so to me I feel there should just be one price in USD from the store and people can convert their prices to the USD price (or it can be automatically converted when viewing steam) that way all prices across all regions are all the same. Theres not going to be any problems in terms of buying games from different regions. No use in proxies and stuff like that and makes things simple to compare.
Maybe its the fact that I don't quite understand why some prices are different across regions, since the way I figure it, the company would want x amount of dollars for each game and not x amount from one country and y amount from another. Then again though since I'm from Aus it would be amazing for us to get proper US prices (not just paying in US dollars) while for other countries it would be quite an increase, and I think Green Man Gaming did the same thing with the euro? (I've never actually used them) and people were largely against it so I might be quite off here.
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me neither. and in some rare cases we germans get even more screwed over than the rest of europe:
http://www.steamprices.com/us/app/243200/memoria
in this special case we even have to pay 6-7 times the russian price, nearly tripple the us price. with this kind of regional pricing, no one should be surprised that some people try to circumvent it... :(
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I'm trying to feel bad for you, then I remember this http://www.steamprices.com/au/topripoffs to save you the read CoD:MW2 as one example is still 89.99 USD in Australia on Steam compared to 19.99 USD in the USA (thank god I'm not big on shooters so it doesn't hurt me directly). That's ~4.5 times the US value. I'm honestly better off some days buying on console price wise for titles that should have been PC no brainers.
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I don't really mind the different pricing. However, I don't plan on staying in my current country of residence forever, so I'm more worried about how much of my library becomes unplayable when I move.
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Not if he has region locked games in his library and then moves out of that region.
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I have region locked games in my library, yet I can still play them?
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Nope - games region-locked to Russia are only playable with Russian IP.
Or for example you can't play Dead Rising in Germany (well, with German IP).
Reports say Steam is quite helpful if you'd write to them about that kind of situations through.
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Hah never thought i would say this, but i'm glad now that i bought South Park from my store for full price
and yeah, like someone said above retroactively locking gifts is kind of a dick move
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Same, I bought Southpark in my store because my Russian contact said it was region locked.
After that people found a workaround and were selling for 9 or 10 keys. I regretted buying it in my shop. Sometimes youre lucky, sometimes youre not. Anyway, if I had been more patient I would be in the same situation many buyers are in now.
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Well, they are unlocking many of those games now. So it may have been just a mistake and South Park could still get unlocked, too.
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" I live in the U.S., so of course most other countries have better prices. "
I just have to point out that op clearly has no idea what he is saying
About the region restrictions, i think it would be ok if prices for all regions were same or similar, i'd be very happy if my prices were like the US even though out income is much more similar to Russia. I also feel like region locks beat the point of trading since you have to find somebody from your country or in a close region which seems like a fool's errand
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I recently traded for a pre-order copy of Thief. Originally, when trading, the gift appeared to be a ROW copy, not region-locked. Today I noticed the gift is suddenly locked to RU+CIS countries, as I hadn't claimed it yet. I sent in a ticket to complain and see what Steam support can do for me concerning this, though after reading about some guy's ban, I'm starting to believe my submission was a mistake and I should just count my losses, lest I bring attention to myself and receive a ban for "circumventing regional pricing/restrictions".
I live in the U.S., so of course most other countries have better prices. I dabble in trading in my spare time, but I do not use a VPN/proxy and I do not buy or sell with Paypal (big no-no); I just like to consider myself a savvy trader. Most of the time I'll trade for ROW copies of games to claim for myself, or possibly resell for a small profit after the game goes off-sale. But now I'm confused where the boundary lies for "circumventing regional pricing/restrictions". If I set a reasonable price for a gift I'm trading, and someone is willing to pay it, do I need to first ask in what country they reside? When purchasing a ROW-activable gift from someone that sets a reasonable price, do I need to ensure they live in my region?
Thanks for your thoughts and comments!
Edit: I'm looking through the Steam ToS right now. The only thing related to trading between regions concerns your agreement not to use "...IP proxying or other methods...to purchase at pricing not applicable to your geography..."
Try to focus on the topic at hand. My opinion that the U.S. has higher prices is based on my experience, which when dealing with other regions is mainly limited to the Brazilian and Russian Steam markets. Regional pricing truly depends on the game and publisher and can obviously not be generalized favorably towards one region.
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