TL;DR
If someone has mentioned this before, my bad.
Disregarding the trade/market issue.
Purely, for the site, it can still be a great service. I imagine one could still have giveaways per region and be fine with it. Its not the ideal thing, but it its better (and still viable i believe) to not having a service like this at all.
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So I can't create giveaways or trade games in sales anymore.
Wow,that is the evilest thing I can imagine. I will buy games from GOG now.
Valve logic:lets put stupid stuff like bidding and team competition and take away good stuff people like.Why make people happy when we can gain more than we alrady have?
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IMPORTANT! On reddit today we could see some wrong info that games can't be activated via VPN, some people said even some no sense that can't be gifted from one to other one region. I can confirm now, that is wrong, here is proof:
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When GabeN comes marching home tonight hoorah hoorah
he'll find that his house was robbed again hoorah hoorah
for when Gabe is greedy and russians are needy
they'll storm to the states and rob his fat face
we'll never see russians trading again!
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if it is becouse of ruble than why all other regions are locked too??=))
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you are an ignorant kid , apple store closed for make new prices
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If that's the case why haven't they made new price already and started selling by raising the price to match new exchange rate? Steam and Apple both know people would buy their product dirt cheap if they didn't do something and dam did the ruble drop so hard. Time to move to Russia ;p
1 US Dollar equals 60.86 Russian Rubles
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how did we become this entitled? it's not like Steam closed down and deleted all our games, they didn't even raise prices or cancelled all sales forever. they just prevented some people from taking advantage of a loophole in region system. Russians still have cheap games like they're supposed to, the rest of just don't get to take advantage of that any more. good for Valve, now bring on the hate. i've been playing Dota a lot lately, there's nothing you can say to me that hasn't already been said :p
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Don't know about other regions, but those prices made it fair for EU ""Tier 2"" Countries. Russians getting all their games 50-90% cheaper that people from Poland, Romania, Cyprus, Greece, Bosnia... and so on, while these pay virtually the same as Switzerland, Germany, Sweden. That is a joke. When they say "our developer tools suggest pricing based on market research and purchasing power parity". That is a joke.
So they can do what they will with their system, as they have the right to do. But don't they try to sell me it's in the name of some kind of economic geo-political fairnes 'cause I don't buy it.
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and if only people from EU2 bought Russian games it would have been fair. since most of those who abused the system were probably from USA and rich EU countries they decided to lock the region, that's also fair. but they should absoulutelly do something about our prices and if they do they should lock the region. that's all i'm saying.
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Ok, I hear you, and you're probably right overall, when it comes to buyers from the US, UK, Sweden, etc. Just from the perspective of many Euro countries, the "purchasing power parity" on Steam is not fair at all. If it were, a lot of people wouldn't complain as adamantly about being unable to purchase from other countries where you just need a much lower % of your income to get the same games.
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Oh really? So how do you explain that here in Croatia you have to spend 10% of your months pay to afford a new game and in US that has way better living standard the game prices are even cheaper? From my perspective I don't see how this move is just and it only seems that Steam is greedy for more money they already have more than enough.
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from my perspective (Croatian perspective) i'm sure if only people from EU2 used Russian traders to get hold of cheap games i'm sure Valve wouldn't have locked the region. since most of their customers were from USA and rich countries in EU they decided to lock it. I'm not saying our prices are fair, Valve should absolutely make pur prices more in line with our living standard but if they do decide to do that some day i wouldn't bitch if they region lock the games. that's all i'm saying. i didn't say what happened is fair for everybody, but you have to admit that people from USA buying Rusian games for pocket change wasn't fair either.
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This will hit regular traders really hard. I'm from Spain and as long as I can still buy from Amazon.com, Nuuvem, etc. luckily it doesn't affect me.
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I am trying to find out how the overall community feels about this and created a short survey for it. It would be great if some of you could fill it out! (thanks to those who already did) Google Survey Link
There aren't many results in it currently since I was silly and made the survey through survey monkey originally and they only let me view 100 results and won't let me export them into the new survey...
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Good thing, good, but you should consider adding something about in what region is the person who is filling the pool, because if i select i buy from my home region might sound good thing for valve, but actually my regions is a ru region so it sounds normal to buy from my region, if i would be from other region i would buy from ru region. you get what i am talking about?
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I understand what you are saying. That's what question 6 is for, to address that while hopefully keeping the results abstract enough to make them usable.
I probably could have approached it differently or better, but sadly I only had a little time!
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At least my store is the cheaper for now. Mexican Store
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My friend today traded for a copy of Space Engineers with a Russian trader, trader gifted him the game, and it WAS NOT region locked, the thing is 2 or 4 packs as this trader said him are region locked, but the copies it gives after redeeming it, aren't region locked.
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He showed the 4-pack screenshot and there was a region lock, and then the single screenshot and there wasn't, then my friend got this game via gift and could activate without problems. But I opened the images while I was playing, in the Steam overlay, so I can't find it, but to be sure, someone can double check. There is Sanctum 2 on sale.
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Anyone know what the next cheapest region is that I can buy from thats not already region locked?
I can't afford full price games on steam on my wage!
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hahahhaa and people laughed at me being paranoid with the reg-lock some days ago, now you got it. naive humanity, support this shit even more and drm crap shit. yes this is what i already saw and so soon? wow. guess there wont be a fight, many petitions, mass media etc. so it will all end up valve getting more greedy than before but all hail gabe and valve.... lol. no wonder iphone etc. are so big, humanity never learns!
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So what will happen with SteamGifts if all games people will purchase since these changes will be region locked?
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Response from dev forum:
"As most of you know, our developer tools suggest pricing based on market research and purchasing power parity. In the case of territories such as Russia, Brazil, and SE Asia, we suggested pricing that is lower than the direct USD conversion. This is based on our assessment of actual pricing of comparable products in that market. Recently Rubles have hit an all-time low which has been a concern of many game developers. We are still assessing the market to see if suggesting new prices in Russia is right for customers who live in that market. We do not think that pricing based on currency conversion only is the right way to approach the Russian market necessarily.
What we are doing immediately in response to the Ruble drop is limiting trading and gifting from Russia to prevent people from taking advantage of the situation. We have been applying a gifting and trading lock of this type on all newly created packages on Steam since mid-2014. Today we have propped a change that will affect all packages on Steam which will not allow them to be unpacked to an account, if gifted or traded from a lower priced region to a higher priced region. This change is not retroactive and only affects new purchases. It also will not affect customers in that region from gifting a copy to other people in that same region. All customers will have proper warning when they are purchasing a gift prior to checkout in those regions as well. We will continue to assess the situation and make changes if necessary in the future. If you have any questions please feel free to write us via the contact form via the Steamworks Development site - Documentation & Help -> Contact Steam Publishing."
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