I had good luck with Fanatical. Never an issue. Until December, 2022. Now I have had, I think 3 winners have issues with Fanatical keys.
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You can quickly go through all the regions on the list on Fanatical by clicking on the dropdown, choosing the bottom-most country and pressing and holding the up key on your keyboard. If the game isn't available in some country the red text and red mark would be easy to spot and stop scrolling. I've seen people here mentioning that their info regarding region locks could be inaccurate sometimes, though.
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It takes like 5 seconds to check if the game has lots of restrictions this way... If it does, me personally I would just skip the game and not give it away. And if there's only a few locked countries in the list it would take maybe a minute to figure out them all. Anyway, Fanatical is not even the worst with this, they at least give the region locks info on all countries for each game, albeit not providing an easier way to check, most other stores though just show if the key would activate in the country you're accessing the store from and that's it lol.
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I had an 50+ car train with many of the keys from Fanatical. Two or three of these turned out to be region restricted. I have talked to Fanatical several times now about this. The reply is that the restrictions are determined by the publisher. Ok. I understand that. But their method of see any region locks is way. too. cumbersome. Some other vendors at least give you a single listing of which countries CAN activate the key. Some will show which countries can NOT activate. Of course these listings are often wrong too, but at least you do not have to spend lots and lots of time to get to the list of countries to include or exclude.
The method TragicBronson mentions is an improvement over how I was doing it - selecting a country from each main region and looking for it in the drop down list. At least one could quickly see if there were any region locks with TB's method. If there were no region locks, you are good to go!. But if there are, it is still (I believe) very cumbersome to find out which countries are NOT region restricted (Fanatical) and then create the contest with the correct regions (SteamGifts). For my train, the cost was several hours. And even still, some keys were incorrectly labeled. The particular moderator at SG then refused to do a re-roll because it could turn out to be another region locked winner. (sigh).
The personal "life" cost involved in trying to be nice to others (doing what one can to prevent bots and others who you might want to exclude... trying to verify region locks and then correctly create the contest... for trains, the time and effort required to manually create lots of contests and then link them together... (I have not had much success with a couple of train creators I have tried)... dealing with key issues or winners who don't respond... etc. I can certainly understand why people would tire out and stop doing giveaways.
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If (and only if) you already own a game yourself, you can check which sub a key activates by using the SteamDB extension and entering the key on https://store.steampowered.com/account/registerkey. It will show you the name of the sub and a link to it on SteamDB. You need to be sure beforehand that you own the same edition of the game. If you for example only own the base game and enter a key for any edition including more than just the base game, the key will be redeemed that way.
The only major known exception are Paradox games, since they use a lot of different fake apps in all their different subs, so oftentimes you can activate mutiple keys for different subs of the same Paradox game. There can be other exceptions but those are rare. Technically you need to own every app and depot listed in a sub or the key will be redeemed.
And of course this ist just possible after already having bought the game. But at least that way you can be sure which sub (with which restrictions) your key will activate even if the store didn't show the correct restrictions.
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If you don't own that game, then just compare list from Fanatical with that from SteamDB if there are many subIDs.
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I am looking at fanatical to get more games and I am not really seeing region lock listed anywhere. The only thing I see, is a drop down to check each country. I looked at steamdb for region locks or where they cant be activated. I assume its just as good?
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