brazil has RR, because of big tax to games, cuz your law consider pc games as gambling as hazarding
*edit no.1 : not only PC games, but consoles and so on as well
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but continental restrictions is new to me...
usually we have only "america" restrictions. now only "south america"?
I'm afraid of where this is going to end...
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in a few times of my life I became ashamed of my country itself (not because the full retarded politicians which is everyday) ...
this is one of those moments.
looks like it trend to became pretty often though. I better brace myself.
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Well, at least this we cannot blame the politicians this time, as it's Valve/Publishers who push region restrictions to protect their interests (cut down trading, disallowing people from more expensive regions getting cheaper games, increase per copy profit)
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partialy indeed. this matter become a issue because of them.
if they were interested, valve certainly will try to market here adapt making the necessary adjustments, not otherwise.
the marco civil did NOTHING good to no one so far.
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This has nothing to do with your Country these restrictions have to do with cross region trading and people in richer regions taking advantage of people in cheaper regions.
Hidankun
brazil has RR, because of big tax to games, cuz your law consider pc games as gambling as hazarding
Not sure what he means by that as these restrictions have noting to do with local laws,it is Valve themselves doing the locks.
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it doesn't work that way. taxes are made to balance these relations.
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Except that's not how it went. Before the regional restrictions, people from cheaper regions bought games and resold them to higher priced regions, thus making developers earn less money. That's why they were added.
Steam doesn't care if you win more or less money on average in relation to other countries. And since occasionally some games were cheaper in BR than other countries, the whole of South America got a region lock. Just be thankful it wasn't like other countries in some regions that are outside their lock. If Steam cared at all about average earning and using taxes to balance all that shit out, Uruguay wouldn't have any lock since we have the same price as US. Essentially, one of the highest regions.
And that's the thing, also. You don't pay taxes through Steam in a lot of places. So they just went the easier route.
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yes, you do. how do you put money on steam wallet?
they pay taxes for that transaction. no money moves for free at government eyes...
you talk like money moves free across ocean. it doesn't work that way either.
i am missing some important point about region lock that doesn't fit in my head thoughts.
for sure is not yours (i'm not being rude, just being sure about it) since a global key is way more valuable than regional.
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Steam cards? I've done a few transactions using PP way back in the day and had no taxes on that either. And there's more ways to get steam wallet without going through possible taxes, of which I've never seen myself.
Keep telling yourself that. Steam is a digital retailer. A lot of the locks make no sense. But no matter how people say it to you, you can't grasp the concepts apparently.
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well, sell a steam card and buy a chocolate for you.
i challenge you to make steam pay you with real life expendable money. you just do workarounds that makes you think that you have money (that will never be yours). even if you sell it in real life, you just transfer virtual money.
what i'm saying is if someone put their money there for you, doesn't mean that this money is yours.
that's the trick. you feel that you have, but you don't legally speaking.
free games are purely marketing and propaganda. there's actualy people (in flash and bones) who pay more than 1 thousand dollars for year to play a free game.
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... https://store.steampowered.com/account/redeemwalletcode
Shut up. Just shut up. You're twisting words and talking out your ass like you know what you're saying when you're clearly ignorant and too dumb to grasp a simple concept like regional pricing and why the locks were introduced.
You can buy things in steam using paypal during checkout. I never said anything about selling to others.
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I was never trying to say how your taxes work read what I said.
I said that is not the reason for the region restrictions.Valve changed those because of people buying in regions that are way cheaper for them,thus Valve is losing profit in the higher priced regions along with the publishers.
I was just trying to point out the changes had nothing to do with any one local taxes or laws,It was about losing profit plain and simple.
I live in the U.S I do not pay taxes for buying games online nor do I if I buy from your region so your taxes would bare little on me and how much it would cost.
Either way no matter how you try and spin this web it is still a web and it has noting to do with your taxes it has to do with Valve and Publishers losing profit.
If I buy a game here for 59.99 and say the publisher gets 30% They would get almost 18 bucks.
If I bought the same game say Brazil for say 30.00 they would only get 10 bucks so each game would lose them 7.00.The worse would be Russia since the ruble is so rubbish no pun intended and they would lose even more.
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Since I joined on this gift deal, I saw that EVERY GAME (that I tried to buy so far) on my Steam have region restrictions.
Can someone confirm this? Live in Brazil btw.
Seems like you may want to check your topic.People keep confirming there are region locks and even was nice enough to explain why they are in place.Yet you keep telling them to check the topic again.
Matter fact you keep brining taxes into it yet you never mentioned it on your topic,Taxes have nothing to do with it,as they get noting from the taxes so why would they care who has higher taxes.I do not pay taxes and even If I did it would be 5.5% for state and no federal and nothing to the publisher or company who sells it.
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you may want to read this and search a little more about PIS, CONFINS, ISS, IOF and eventually IRRF and CIDE Royalties.
this might be shocking but money doesn't move free across thru frontiers (unless you're doing some tax evasion which can be more expensive when you get caught). i really don't think that steam work that way.
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uh... I'm genuinely confused here. I live in Brazil and I know (to an extent) how taxes work. What I'm saying is that region restriction on Steam (your original question) has nothing to do with how taxes work in Brazil (like Hidankun says), especially since the restriction is to South America (Should be Latin America, actually), and different countries in Latin America have different tax rates. Similarly, there are other regions that have restrictions (as you can see in the New Giveaway page).
The sole reason for that is that the games on Steam are cheaper in those regions (especially Russia and Brazil) in comparison to other regions (that don't have region restriction) like Europe and North America. Before region restrictions were in place, people from the last mentioned regions were buying games from people in Russia and Brazil for cheaper, and the sellers still made some profit (the so called traders). Now that region restrictions are in place, people in North America and Europe are "forced" to buy games from their own store, paying the price that was determined for their region.
Finally, now, it's not possible for me to buy from Steam a game as a gift for a friend in Canada, for example, but the opposite (my friend in Canada buying a game as a gift for me) is possible. As a concrete example, I want to give a game away here on SG, and I want it to reach people from all over the world, so I'm gonna ask that my friend from Canada to buy it from me, so I'll have a copy of the game without any regional restriction.
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now we are getting somewhere... steam is creating economic blocks because diferent countries currency exchange are affecting their profit.
now it makes sense and is pretty reasonable.
taxes does influence a lot but not directly. our money is much more devalued than other countries and we have low purchasing power because of that (i can't say if is this real on russian reality - if you know please tell me). this fact increase their motivation to create economic blocks (not properly region locks because, as i'm seeing, there's no continent representation) because higher taxes sell less so they need to open up some profit to sell more (i think).
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It has nothing to do with the laws of your country as far as I know. At the end of last year Steam decided to add activation restriction to all the games in certain regions, one of them being South America, so games bought in SA can only be activated in SA (well not just SA as the restriction applies also to Mexico and some other countries in Central America I think)
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that's the reason it happened. this country is a jungle with monkeys on legislative.
your first sentence is totally right, because if has something to do with laws, they will do like facebook: adapt to the country, not otherwise.
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It looks more like Latin America, this is the list
Notice: Gift purchases for [Game] can only be added to the gift recipient's library if they are in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Bahamas, Belize, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, Paraguay, Suriname, El Salvador, Uruguay or Venezuela.
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brace ourselves, only us whom suffer can truly understand what's like..
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The reason is to prevent people from mainly Western Europe and USA buying or trading for games from cheaper areas(Russia, Brazil and one other I forget mainly). If you are not selling/trading games to people outside Brazil(well Latin America) which Valve doesn't want to happen the only impact this has on you is maintaining the significantly lower price(a few quick random examples shows it being about 60% of so pretty huge difference) the regional store has or even increasing it in some cases.
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This!
And it's mainly because of the different value the Dollar had when steam started to "regionalize" the prices to brazil. Back in the time the ratio was like 1usd=2-2.15brl, right now it is 1usd=3,4brl.
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This doesn't stop me, living in Argentina, to have a friend buy the game in brazil, and send it to me as a gift
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you might lead something here...
are you saying that valve divide the world in blocks by the power of their money?
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Nope. The world was already divided in blocks long before Valve even dreamed of one day existing. All that happened is that Valve finally conceded to the multiple pressures to take an actual stance on the subject and it resulted in this.
It is tricky to judge properly even if you ignore everything save what is best for a company but I feel Valve ended up just going with the simplest, quickest and easiest solution so people would shut up and they could move on to other things. And well, while the merits and consequences can certainly be argued if that was indeed the intention then I see it worked pretty damn well.
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just to be sure... you just want to say what i said but in your words, right?
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No, you say Valve has enough power and influence to not only dictate things but they have done so.
I say they don't have anywhere near that much power/influence and that they didn't decide anything but instead tried to deal with the conflict of interests without actually dealing with it. Mainly, I presume, because they have no chance whatsoever of doing so.
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I think (don't quote me in this one) that they are only region locking us for gifts and not for games bought for your own account.
This is mainly to stop cross region trading. Even though only Brazil and Mexico are currently getting cheaper prices they locked all of LATINamerica(valve doesn't really knows what SouthAmerica means apparently).
So try buying keys instead of gifts, they aren't region locked.
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Since I joined on this gift deal, I saw that EVERY GAME (that I tried to buy so far) on my Steam have region restrictions.
Can someone confirm this? Live in Brazil btw.
I'm also Brazilian! E aí, tudo bom? Nos encontramos novamente.
I'll leave the topic in English so folk can understand it.
Every game you buy in Brazil through Steam will be region locked to South America.
Been there, done that.
You ask, in a desperate uproar. Well, several websites like Humble Bumdle and Bundle Stars offer more games for less the price and without region blocks - the last part as far as I'm concerned. Those websites mostly accepted credit cards, PayPal and amazon payment.
Also, I contacted Nuuvem recently, in hopes they'd guarantee me a lack of Region Restrictions and they did not only underestimate my intelligence but assured me that they can't guarantee shit anything. The response from the support goes as follows:
As restrições regionais de jogos da Steam já existem a bastante tempo, desde bem mais que ano passado.
Por isso, só podemos garantir o funcionamento do jogo no país onde a compra foi realizada. Se você pretende comprar jogos na Nuuvem para fornecer a outras pessoas de outros países, não temos como garantir o funcionamento do jogo.
O que posso recomendar se você pretende fazer isso que é que peça para o seu amigo que será presenteado para iniciar a compra e então você mesmo conclui o pagamento.
So yeah, estamos num mato sem cachorro mesmo.
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technically, not just south america, it's more like latin america and the caribbean
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Yes, you are correct. My bad. Thanks for pointing it out (:
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Steam sets there own region restrictions to who they want to sell to,before that they left it up to publishers.
Key resellers like Nuuvem,GMG,GamersGate and so on,have no say or control over the region locks nor does valve these are up to the publisher.What they can control is what regions they sell to,or if by request of the publisher they can ask them to restrict which regions can buy from.
Some publishers have gone as far as to block payments outside of there country from buying games example would be Nuuvem and 2K games and maybe more I am not aware of.Though I would think it would be easier to just region lock the keys instead of purchase block them lol
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Key resellers like Nuuvem,GMG,GamersGate and so on,have no say or control over the region locks nor does valve these are up to the publisher.What they can control is what regions they sell to,or if by request of the publisher they can ask them to restrict which regions can buy from.
This makes a lot of sense and it's very good to know of. Thanks a bunch (:
Though I would think it would be easier to just region lock the keys instead of purchase block them lol
I understand what you mean and I totally agree. This whole Region Lock thing is still a bit confusing even after such a long time since it was first implemented.
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Unless you move to USA, then yes, everygame will have region restriction.
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It's important to add, that even the extra copies you get from redeeming some bundle games are region-locked as well. But these don't have any tag on them, just to mention a few: Ibb & Obb - Best Friends Forever Double Pack, Contraption Maker, Frozen Synapse Prime, Heavy Bullets.
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Todos os jogos comprados na loja Steam do Brasil são bloqueados por região. Somente podem ser ativados na região América do Sul nos países especificados. A Steam fez isso, pois os jogos vendidos na loja do Brasil são geralmente bem mais baratos do que nas outras lojas. A Steam quis evitar que pessoas de outros países comprassem jogos pela loja do Brasil ou Russia e ela perdesse dinheiro.
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Since I joined on this gift deal, I saw that EVERY GAME (that I tried to buy so far) on my Steam have region restrictions.
Can someone confirm this? Live in Brazil btw.
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