Free Steam Sticker and chance to win steam deck on dec 8th- Today

That's inaccurate, at least relative to the considerations that would be relevant for this circumstance; Mexico is actually considered to be placed in Central America, rather than North America. According to the UN (and by most any other cultural/poltiical/economic consideration), Central America is defined as all sections of the North American continent falling south of the US.

And if that feels arbitrary to you, consider how much more arbitrary the divide between Europe and Asia is (relative to country or country grouping associations)- even moreso, given how the culture doesn't shift as substantially and quickly as it does between Mexico and the US, when moving from, say, Romania to Ukraine, or Ukraine to Russia. (By strict considerations, the geographical division of Europe and Asia is defined by the border created by the Ural mountain range, and progressing with that associative positioning downward from there, but that reference point typically is not used as a guideline when considering cultural, political, or economic divides.)

These kind of divides become all the more substantial when considering things against the framework of Steam, where there are even more geopolitical [eg, censorship, marketing restrictions, necessitated local control over regional business branches, etc] and/or economic divisions between regions to consider [due to regional pricing, promotion histories, purchasing trends, etc].

So, by most any conception (that is to say, continental plate considerations aside), Mexico is not part of NA and, as far as these kind of promotions go, there's some fairly intuitive additional reasons for Mexico's exclusion from NA+EU based frameworks (at least, in the sense of being in line with how Steam divisions operate in general).

TL;DR version: Mexico is Central America, and its difference in economics and culture mean that it's not only typically split from the rest of NA for considerations, but that it may perhaps also understandably be split from the otherwise comparable economical reference points of the US, CA, EU, and so forth, when video game promotions are being considered.

Still totally fine to be bummed out about it, but it's not as simple as Mexico being "forgotten". In fact, typically exclusions are caused by restrictions from the country in question, due to assumed organizational issues, or because local distribution is handled by a different publisher that isn't as easy to rope into the promotion. So while it's possible Steam is excluding Mexico willfully [It is Valve, after all], there's enough cause to consider a more external explanation first.

In this case, as SpaceClick suggested just below, it's likely entirely due to marketing and distribution considerations.

The problem is it is already past November 14th 2022. So even if i bought something on the store 2 weeks ago, i'd still not make the cutoff date.

Apparently not.

I tried joining the giveaway and i was accepted.
So the keys from bundles and other sites i purchased, must count as "Steam" store purchases as well.

happy cakeday!

Since it specified "Steam" purchases, i assumed it had to be through the Steam store, and thus kinda lame, as using Steam keys shows you're basically sending Valve money but through a 3rd party.

But yeah, it's not lame at all, other than the wording could have been done better, or maybe included an asterisk to state any steam keys purchased in that time, were considered Steam purchases.

I hadn't read that. That will make it a lot more fair.

Care to share any more info about the source of that "nope" ?

I'm genuinely terrible at reminders so I'm wondering if I can get someone to notify or ping me 20 times in discord.

yes, but consider this.

I am dense and forget things with alarming frequency.

Of course, it's not a big deal in their overall books either way... but it's still a fairly big giveaway.

They could easily have made it 10-20 Steam Decks and it would have pulled quite a lot of people regardless. I believe The Game Awards did do some giveaway for PS5 or something when they launched, but that was like literally one console. That's usually the level that these type of giveaways are at.

I'd say that doing one every minute is a bit above and beyond what they needed to do to achieve their marketing goal. And they also didn't have to do the 512gb version. So I'd say it's still a pretty generous giveaway in the grand scheme. Their goal is of course to promote the product and Steam, but how they go about it says a lot.

We are 1 hour away from Greece ;(

Anyway, not surprised :/ Thanks for letting me know

Did you know that we recently changed our English name to "Turkiye" to solve this issue :D

gotta redo it every year or it relocks. had a locked account for most of my time on steam