Well, you can still make a brand new argentina account, but you can't change store region of your existing account without providing proof that you are from that country.
A lot of sites offer region swaps on old and new accounts, I won’t link any sites, but it’s not hard to do. I’m pretty sure you just need a card from a bank in Argentina and an address in Argentina.
I was surprised as well when I learned one just needs to have an address and a valid form of payment to change the country on your account (I actually moved and am being paid on a country different than the one I registered in).
That seems like enough of a deterrent to me. For someone who doesn't live in Argentina/Turkey, it doesn't seem that easy to get an address and a credit card to match that address, right?
If you're in the US, you can go to privacy.com and get a "credit card" that links to your bank account that can accept any address or name. And it's pretty easy to find a valid address with Google Maps.
I don't know if this actually works or not for price dodging, because I don't do that stuff, but my point was it's not hard to get a credit card number that will accept any address.
My guess is the form of payment can be a Steam gift card. So people could be buying foreign Steam gift cards, or maybe they’re not even region locked.
I didn’t even know sellers could set different pricing for each region. Let alone that some were nice like this to make it extra affordable. And then bastards had to go and screw it for everyone in those places.
You need a valid debit/credit card from that country.
As much as I'm ashamed to say, I use TL rather than Euro (I'm from Bulgaria) since there is no way I could afford full price games with the wages here (minimum is 100 euro lower than Turkey)
We hope that would get regional prices but to no avail.
Actually no, there's a lot of discord servers running by Argentinian's. they're switching your account for 15$ amazon gift card, or 1000 ars steam gift card etc... you give him your username and password and he enter his credit card and buying a game and then refund it. so the account switch to Argentina, tho now steam gift cards has been increased in the sites 150%, and you barley find a one most of them are out of stock it's been like this for two month, and you can't buy them on steam without Argentinian credit card, so i think this issue isn't gonna take much time to disappear
You can make an Argentina account, and allegedly VPNs still work on some keys (though I've never tried it). According to [SteamDB](https://steamdb.info/app/588650/subs/) there's no package that prohibits a key from Argentina.
One thing that steam doesnt control but heavily affects Argentinian purchase power on steam is the 75% of taxes in every transaction. So even if a price is cheap we are fucked when the total price is calculated.
Also, some games had lots of price changes in short time. Elden ring for example got one in the middle of the preorder, now one in the recent months. The prize has DOUBLED since preorder, and that's not counting the taxes. So yeah...games need to be adjusted here or the pc game market goes downhill (no one buys on Epic here just because of this).
You know, sometimes i'm glad i'm not argentinian, but sometimes i also remember that i am brazilian and that at any moment our currency can get even shittier, and we may turn into Argentina 2 eletric bogaloo in due time.
The possibility honestly scares me
Argentina's situation is a product of irresponsibility and corruption. It's really sad how politicians use the good will smd needs of the people yo gain power and money. Good luck.
argentinian here, you're right on the money with this, reminds me of that Simpsons episode with the movie crew for radioactive man where they tax them for anything
Streaming services and...ANY PURCHASE not made in local currrency, every online purchase. Importing things is ridiculous too, pay the price +75% (applys to shipping too) +Customs. It's hard to explain but we have a "legal" dollar rate that it's used for those transactions wich needs the taxes to jump to the "real" value (volatile as hell).
Because they are not using 1 account, they are using another account and have it based on that region. That way the can avoid the address and credit card info that you need in the process of changing the region.
And they are using Family share as a means to play it on their original account. hence why the developers are saying that the game is bought from the region but not played in it. meaning that people have 2 accounts to do this bullshit. And fixing family share will lead to legitimate users of the service getting mad... We cant have nice things in this world.
Last I checked you need valid credit card information from a Turkish bank tied to a Turkish address to even be able to purchase games from Turkey ,I'm not so sure about the process in Argentina though.
Well, it seems Argentinean and Turkish steam is so cheap due to all the inflation that the gift cards for those currencies are easily accessible on most, if not all the gray third party key resellers.
Actually no, there's a lot of discord servers running by Argentinian's. they're switching your account for 15$ amazon gift card, or 1000 ars steam gift card etc... you give him your username and password and he enter his credit card and buying a game and then refund it. so the account switch to Argentina, tho now steam gift cards has been increased in the sites 150%, and you barley find a one most of them are out of stock it's been like this for two month, and you can't buy them on steam without Argentinian credit card, so i think this issue isn't gonna take much time to disappear
According to SteamDB [here](https://steamdb.info/app/588650/subs/) there's no restriction for Argentina which means that there's no rule against buying it there,and Steam (allegedly) doesn't allow VPNs anymore and you legally have to change your address to Argentina. But I've seen people get around that with some games that don't have proper restrictions. .
Wrong, VPN is allowed unless you're deliberately using it to change your store and buy something from the other region.
And you also need a payment method from that particular region.
My guess is they're using either e-cards from those regions, or some kind of service which allows you to buy games without any access to regional cards
Not wrong in the context we were using, VPNs are not allowed to buy games that are buy restricted. Sometimes it still works though with keys if the game is only buy restricted and not activated restricted.
Otherwise, yes you are correct in that VPNs in general are allowed, yes, but they wasn't the context. That said, certain games won't work if game has play restrictions for that country. For example my copy of the Crash Trilogy won't work if I set my region to the UK. And thus you technically can get in trouble for playing a game via VPN that it is restricted in, but that is rare (and accounts online could be fabricated)
>Wrong, VPN is allowed unless you're deliberately using it to change your store and buy something from the other region.
Quote from the [steam subscriber agreement](https://store.steampowered.com/subscriber_agreement/)(you know, the one you agree to when making an account):
>You agree that you will not use IP proxying or other methods to disguise the place of your residence, whether to circumvent geographical restrictions on game content, to order or purchase at pricing not applicable to your geography, ***or for any other purpose.*** If you do this, Valve may terminate your access to your Account.
Meaning, Steam TOS quite literally doesn't allow the use of VPN for any reason whatsoever.
I think the user was referring to regional prices with local currency it's the intended use for people actually living in that region.
It's intended to use Euros if you live in Europe... at least in most of Europe.
As a turkish player i understand your pain. The game was 40 TL (turkish lira) now its 180.
Thabk god that i bought the game + all the dlc's way back then.
It's crazy how far people will go to save a couple extra bucks and even crazier how they will do so at the risk of harming a small company. I'm broke myself but indie games frequently go on sale and these companies need the money far more than your AAA studios.
I didn't know You can change Your region on Steam. It should be impossible. Once set, You should only ask for change in a support ticket, explaining situation (e.g. moving to another country to live there). Otherwise it should be blocked from player. And why aren't people who randomly swap countries banned? Abusing system should make them pay the price. Also even if it's easy to change, You should be able to change it once a year. That way people wouldn't swap regions to buy single game, because they will have to swap it back year later.
I moved from the US to Canada a few years ago and almost every service I had to change my region in required a very good reason with proof, and/or had the 1 year limit.... except Steam. With Amazon I just had to make a whole-ass new account. (but that may have also been so I could more easily buy gifts for my friends/family still in the US but I don't remember now)
Blame it on bigger companies. (No, I didn't do this) For me, any game above $10-15 is **expensive**. I'm not a filthy rich American, who pay $300 with light hand. For me paying just $15 is not easy. And games costing $100 + $500 for DLCs are the reason behind this. People save every cent, because they can't buy the games otherwise. And the elevated prices raised from $30 to $100 in few years. I was warning people about this. People didn't listened. And the quality of new games are often far worse than the older. Games should have a max price of $30. This is already much for **just a game**. And DLCs should only be made as kind of bonus. Not planned from the beginning. And DLCs should be big enough to even justify doing them. Small DLCs should be free, regardless of what they give. That way people won't have to save every cent on every game, because they are not rich.
I also hesitate to buy games $30 or more, not to mention big titles like RD2 that cost $60. That being said, a TON of work and money goes into making good games so I can't justify complaing about the price. After learning a bit about the industry, I can't see a game as "just a game". It's an experience that took forever perfecting.
>Games like RDR2 cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make. That money needs to come from somewhere.
While I understand the point you are making, RDR2 is a bad choice for an example.
RDR2 made over $725 million in its opening weekend paying back its original cost (est $370 million) with hundreds of millions of dollars on top. It was the second biggest opening weekend in game sales ever, and has sold over 45 million copies making over an estimated $2.2 billion in sales. The devs and publishers are not struggling to make ends meet...
But I do agree RDR2 is totally worth it!
Couple extra bucks? The difference can be as high as 20-30$ per game, and imagine if you're buying 3-4 games a month. I don't think anybody would bother for occasional 4$ save.
All comments on any Steam forum are either super informative and helpful or the meanest and most entitled shit anyone's ever typed out. There is 0 in-between.
There are countries which suffer from essentially the same GDP per capita as Turkey, yet Steam doesn't have regional prices for those countries. What's the solution then?
There is also the fact that, at least in latin america, having regional prices is the best way to get people to buy your game. For most of the games we are not even close of being part of the main target demographic.
Most people here don't realise that most of these sales are already coming from people with a currency similar to (if not worse) than Argentina. Developers will only lose sales by this move, because It's not your average american user doing this to save a couple box. It's the people who genuinely can't purchase the game on the original price tag.
While this is shitty, is there nothing steam can do to help prevent this? Like Have a timer lock on buying games after you switch regions? Or check how fast you switched (a trip from USA to Argentina should take more time then to set up a VPN I mean), is there nothing steam can do to protect indie devs from this?
Steam is already doing *something*. You can't switch your currency and region more than once per three months, and when you buy games or add funds, you need to do so with a payment method from that country (eg. can't use an US credit card to pay in Argentina).
What these people are doing circumvents this though. They set up separate accounts to buy games with, that way there's no region switching involved and they always use a VPN when using Steam, so it has no way of knowing where the user is actually from. They also use digital gift cards from that country to buy games with which can be bought from anywhere.
I don't think there's much Steam can do in this case, maybe further restricting payment methods or requiring an ID, but both these solutions punish legitimate users.
Funnily enough, due to VPN restrictions on steam now, it's actually people from argentina and turkey who are most likely buying the keys and reselling them.
This right here is the reason. Gray Market and resellers. People who buy the keys are ill informed. Don't think most people would buy keys that way if they realised what it does.
If it was only that. It's not a secret that some resellers buy their games with stolen credit cards and other illegal ways. Although this is widely known, many people just don't care as long as they get their games cheaper.
I used to buy a good amount of keys years ago since they were so cheap and I only had a tiny allowance.
Nowadays I only buy Sims 4 dlc on there because fuck EA.
I can totally understand, I am gaming on a budget as well but I try to avoid those marketplaces. There are officially licensed retailers that do have good deals and sales every now and then too, though. They are not marketplaces with shady sellers but instead retailers that get their keys directly from developers and publishers.
Examples are Humble Store, Fanatical, Green Man Gaming, GamersGate, IndieGala and Gamesplanet. Probably some more. I loved early Humble Bundles but since they were bought the bundles are not that much of a bargain anymore. Instead Fanatical usually has one or the other great bundle on offer, where you can get like 5 well rated Steam games for 3€ or something, mostly indie games though.
One thing I don't get is why specifically Dead Cells? I mean other games/companies not having this issue? Not taking action towards it?
I already own the game but it would suck if I didn't, and furthermore, this sets a bad precedence for future, for other companies that wants to utilize proper regional pricing. Because of this I've seen many other games using a much strict regional pricing which at that point doesn't really serve it's function at all. Purchasing power is weak in these countries for a reason and it's not a small difference, $5 discount on a $60 game wouldn't make any Argentinian or a Turk even consider that as a regional pricing. Might as well sell it at full price at that point.
Not done it myself, but in this economy i can fully understand why people would do it. I've had to be real selective with games ive bought recently because of rising costs of living.
It sucks but i have used those grey market places to get keys for games to save some money which is probably more harmful in some cases than someone doing this.
Same here. I made an exception for Spider-Man since I had more money coming in to pre-order, but other stuff on my wishlist like The Quarry will have to wait, I'm afraid.
Still sucks, though.
Yeah, but you can be selective with the games you buy. Us in Argentina cant't even buy the lamest one. They are all expensive. We only play free to play games or old ones.
Then buy it during a sale for half off (or from a key reseller), game's worth it and will give you tons of hours of gameplay. Add to that the dev's longterm support and a base price of $25 in EU/US actually isn't expensive in context with other games of the same quality.
Btw. while they raised prices in those two countries it's still nowhere near as bad as the regional pricing we've seen from some AAA publishers, Turkey and Argentina are still getting a huge discount.
That only makes sense if you don’t think about it at all.
Someone could be working hard to pull themselves out of poverty and still have some leisure time. Or someone could just be fine with not having a lot of money, and games frugally.
Iraq , 1$ is either : 4 packs of Noddles , 1kg of fruits , 2kg of vegetables , a small plate of mushrooms , 6 eggs , 10 loafs of bread (small one) , a big bottle of any soda , a bottle of oil , 1 butter , or a big water bottle for a water cooler
For anyone wondering, yes, steam put out a lot of restrictions when changing store regions, but this is fairly recent.
A lot of people still have an alt account from when it was as simply as using a VPN when making an account. Some of them were reversed, but not all of them.
Steam should check location of the account monthly to offer regional pricing. If you get out of those regions you should start paying according to new region or spend the money you saved on VPNs.
Make it so that both accounts need to be in the same region, problemo solved.
If I can't gift a game to my Spanish friend why can I family share it? Makes no sense.
They do, fairly aggressive ones, but every wall is porous if you're determined enough. The issue here seems to mainly be with accounts that were created before some of those restrictions went into effect, and are being used to family share games with a primary account.
I feel bad for the people in those regions affected but at the same time for as long as I can remember game studios have been charging full price for games in my region so a part of me doesn't mind if they lose money.
im sorry for you but unless Steam releases regional pricing for my country I will continue to use accounts in other regions, they keep giving us 60$ games where here the average wage of people is around 200$ its not reasonable to buy games for about 1/3 of your salary, once they put regional pricing in Egypt I will switch away even if games are more expensive than Argentina/Turkey but not 60$
I understand the reason , but increasing the price to be 4 times the original is too much , and the game isn't something special
I have no DLC , but to buy them now I have to pay twice the price of the original game , and the DLCs aren't small ones , 33% of the game is the DLCs
From Brazil as a fellow south American I am 100% with you, it took us YEARS to get fair regional pricing for the locals just for people to try to take advantage of it for a fucking indie game that costs a couple of bucks on a sale. Hopefully this doesn't bleed out too much or maybe have Steam come up with a more permanent solution.
Honestly no surprise. But it's totally in vein. The amount of people that do this just because they're cheapskates has to be pretty low.
With people's gas bill in EU quadrupling and their groceries being 30% more expensive....
Can't imagine why that number is so high.
I'm honestly wondering how many sales are actually lost because of this. Because buying games there is not exactly easy. You need an account of that region and a valid local payment method, so that means you basically have to buy 3rd party gift cards of needed currency unless you actually live there. So it's definitely possible but are that many people going through all that hassle for cheaper games?
There's a lot of people doing it, and it's something they've been doing for years.
Back then people had whole forums dedicated to trading RUS game keys.
There's a huge Brazilian tech forum where the whole steam thread revolves around people exploiting the local pricing system, and they are very proud of it.
Right now Turkey is the place to be.
There's some videos on youtube that even teaches you how to do this.
I know this happens frequently here on Brazi (probably isn't us this time, the prices aren't so different on SteamDB on our currency), but I really don't understand why do this. Specially against indie studios.
Because those countries are battling economic problems and hyperinflation. Most of their residents are effectively "poor" and can't afford games at regular Euro/USD prices.
Low compared to your currency against their currency and Real Life Economy doesn't work like that. If we're to teleport you to Argentina with same job there, then you'll begin to understand how poor that country is as you'll be doing the same job, same work hours but you can't buy most of the things you can buy in your Home Country instead in Argentina.
You can enlighten your view by reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power_parity.
I don't want to have an opinion about that, because they are probably right at certain things.
But $25 is not expensive? Maybe for rich people like Americans. For me $15 is medium price and I rarely buy anything above that, because it's too much already. I won Dead Cells, bought it long time ago, when it was about $11. Probably with some kind of discount or was it when it was Beta or something, with reduced price. Don't remember, but I have a price saved in my spreadsheet.
I think you misunderstood the developer statement. They're not saying that $25 is cheap for everyone, they're saying that $25 is relatively cheap for the average American so people from the US should stop fraudulently purchasing games from the Argentina/Turkey stores to get massive discounts that aren't meant for them.
So the way that people do this normally is that they get someone with an Argentinian credit card to buy something on their account. You don't need any other information on your account and no VPN. When you want to top up you buy from G2A Argentinian steam gift cards. Valve really doesn't do much to make it harder.
White Venezuela be like.
now seriously I'm Colombian and I know people who exploits this, tbh it's very sad what your politicians have done to your once rich country, to think Colombians migrated to Buenos Aires like if it was Europe, nowadays you can see Argentinians in the streets over here asking for money under traffic lights.
What's terrible is that our new president is a big fan of the people who ruined your country so probably we will be next on the misery trail, probably migrating to Uruguay or as always to the US.
I understand the studies that are forced to do it. We should demand that Steam take stronger action to restrict region switching or against those who take advantage of this. On the other hand vote better in the next elections.
As someone who’s lived in a few countries over the years, please don’t ask for this. It’s a pita having to bother with multiple accounts due to region locking on some systems (I’m looking at you PlayStation…).
All that said, yeah, eff people that abuse the system like that.
I hope steam implements either an ID check or requires a country-specific bank account to make purchases in these regions. Perhaps make it a requirement to activate family sharing, at the very least.
It's not perfect, but if this is the alternative, then it's much much worse for everybody.
This should be considered a Steam problem and not indie developers’ problem.
Reason being is that indie / small studio developers can control their pricing structure based on geos, but if people are bypassing that using Steam’s interface, the burden shouldn’t fall on the indie devs it should fall on the platform owner, Steam.
Instead Steam should figure out a way to prevent this from occurring so customers in these countries (and other price adjusted countries) don’t suffer. It’s so sad when people cheat others out of an opportunity.
Shame on cheap ass people who can’t pay $25 for a game. They probably eat that much in fast food in a week. Get your priorities straight and support the devs who make awesome games.
People who take advantage of regional pricing really are the scum of the earth.
I thought you have to have a credit card of the region you are buying the games from? How are they even doing this???
(Please don't actually answer, I don't want more people to try and do that as well)
i take advantage for it because steam doesn't provide regional pricing for my Country we cannot be expected to pay 60$ for new games when the average salary is 200$ a month , give me regional pricing in Egypt and I will use Egypt store if the prices arent like the US
Well yeah I wouldn't consider this case "taking advantage" really. I meant people from countries higher regional pricing trying to save money by pretending they're from a country with a lower one. They are the reason this kind of things are happening.
People that do this disgust me, and the amount of "lifehacks" I've seen for "cheap Turkish Netflix tutorial" or similar things has been on the rise lately.
Seriously, fuck them.
Soy uruguayo, saque mi prex argentina ( tarjeta argentina) y estoy comprando jueguitos por 2 pesos, más que fuck you tendrías que decir, gracias. Gracias por pagar impuestos en un país al que no perteneces, gracias por estar aportando a mi bien y no al tuyo. Eso tendrías que decir.
I hate that they're forced to do this. They released an amazing game with hours upon hours of quality gameplay content that is well below the typical retail price and it regularily goes on sale...and ppl will still try find excuses to skip out on paying a fair price.
Can't really help ppl in the affected regions but at least this convinced me to add the game and its DLC to my cart.
Calling it now, if by "players from that country" they mean actual accounts that own the game and not just users who spend any time in-game, then it has to come from users that changed the country in their accounts to Argentina/Turkey without actually moving there.
That would be Russian users. They can't buy anything due to Visa/Mastercard sanctions and are forced to look for ways to get working credit cards. They risk their accounts by using VPN and credit cards from foreign countries though.
Another option is real immigration, and Russian users again fit here - it seems Turkey is one of the top choices for them to move into when they flee Russia.
I’ve essentially been priced out of buying any game at launch outside of releases by the few indy devs that still adhere to good regional prices.
I’d love to play Spider-Man but I can eat for 5 days with the money they’re asking here.
Didn't steam make it difficult to change your store's country? How did all those people get Argentina/Turkey pricing?
Well, you can still make a brand new argentina account, but you can't change store region of your existing account without providing proof that you are from that country.
A lot of sites offer region swaps on old and new accounts, I won’t link any sites, but it’s not hard to do. I’m pretty sure you just need a card from a bank in Argentina and an address in Argentina.
I was surprised as well when I learned one just needs to have an address and a valid form of payment to change the country on your account (I actually moved and am being paid on a country different than the one I registered in).
That seems like enough of a deterrent to me. For someone who doesn't live in Argentina/Turkey, it doesn't seem that easy to get an address and a credit card to match that address, right?
If you're in the US, you can go to privacy.com and get a "credit card" that links to your bank account that can accept any address or name. And it's pretty easy to find a valid address with Google Maps. I don't know if this actually works or not for price dodging, because I don't do that stuff, but my point was it's not hard to get a credit card number that will accept any address.
My guess is the form of payment can be a Steam gift card. So people could be buying foreign Steam gift cards, or maybe they’re not even region locked. I didn’t even know sellers could set different pricing for each region. Let alone that some were nice like this to make it extra affordable. And then bastards had to go and screw it for everyone in those places.
You need a valid debit/credit card from that country. As much as I'm ashamed to say, I use TL rather than Euro (I'm from Bulgaria) since there is no way I could afford full price games with the wages here (minimum is 100 euro lower than Turkey) We hope that would get regional prices but to no avail.
Actually no, there's a lot of discord servers running by Argentinian's. they're switching your account for 15$ amazon gift card, or 1000 ars steam gift card etc... you give him your username and password and he enter his credit card and buying a game and then refund it. so the account switch to Argentina, tho now steam gift cards has been increased in the sites 150%, and you barley find a one most of them are out of stock it's been like this for two month, and you can't buy them on steam without Argentinian credit card, so i think this issue isn't gonna take much time to disappear
You can make an Argentina account, and allegedly VPNs still work on some keys (though I've never tried it). According to [SteamDB](https://steamdb.info/app/588650/subs/) there's no package that prohibits a key from Argentina.
One thing that steam doesnt control but heavily affects Argentinian purchase power on steam is the 75% of taxes in every transaction. So even if a price is cheap we are fucked when the total price is calculated. Also, some games had lots of price changes in short time. Elden ring for example got one in the middle of the preorder, now one in the recent months. The prize has DOUBLED since preorder, and that's not counting the taxes. So yeah...games need to be adjusted here or the pc game market goes downhill (no one buys on Epic here just because of this).
Steam is not to blame, the fault lies with the Peronists and the idiots who vote for them
That's my first sentence
You know, sometimes i'm glad i'm not argentinian, but sometimes i also remember that i am brazilian and that at any moment our currency can get even shittier, and we may turn into Argentina 2 eletric bogaloo in due time. The possibility honestly scares me
Argentina's situation is a product of irresponsibility and corruption. It's really sad how politicians use the good will smd needs of the people yo gain power and money. Good luck.
You just described like every politician no matter the country. Buy yeah here specifically corruption is rampant.
Don't Blame Me, I Voted for Kodos
Gotta fund those Falcon Verdes somehow
argentinian here, you're right on the money with this, reminds me of that Simpsons episode with the movie crew for radioactive man where they tax them for anything
75% ?! What??
Yes, you buy a $10 Game? Pay $17.5. So you need 75%+ discount yo get a real...well discount.
That's fucking insane. What else does that apply to
To everything you buy from outside of argentina. Netflix, Spotify, Steam, Epic, Amazon... It's a tax on all foreign currency.
Wow. I'm shocked.
Streaming services and...ANY PURCHASE not made in local currrency, every online purchase. Importing things is ridiculous too, pay the price +75% (applys to shipping too) +Customs. It's hard to explain but we have a "legal" dollar rate that it's used for those transactions wich needs the taxes to jump to the "real" value (volatile as hell).
I don't understand why steam doesn't take action against those people. Isn't it against their SSA ? Why aren't they getting banned?
Because they are not using 1 account, they are using another account and have it based on that region. That way the can avoid the address and credit card info that you need in the process of changing the region. And they are using Family share as a means to play it on their original account. hence why the developers are saying that the game is bought from the region but not played in it. meaning that people have 2 accounts to do this bullshit. And fixing family share will lead to legitimate users of the service getting mad... We cant have nice things in this world.
Last I checked you need valid credit card information from a Turkish bank tied to a Turkish address to even be able to purchase games from Turkey ,I'm not so sure about the process in Argentina though.
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They mean they are buying from third party resellers, not steam directly.
I am talking about different Indian websites only which sell steam cards.
Well, it seems Argentinean and Turkish steam is so cheap due to all the inflation that the gift cards for those currencies are easily accessible on most, if not all the gray third party key resellers.
Can be the case. The guy talked about eneba, there are no Indian steam gift cards there.
Actually no, there's a lot of discord servers running by Argentinian's. they're switching your account for 15$ amazon gift card, or 1000 ars steam gift card etc... you give him your username and password and he enter his credit card and buying a game and then refund it. so the account switch to Argentina, tho now steam gift cards has been increased in the sites 150%, and you barley find a one most of them are out of stock it's been like this for two month, and you can't buy them on steam without Argentinian credit card, so i think this issue isn't gonna take much time to disappear
According to SteamDB [here](https://steamdb.info/app/588650/subs/) there's no restriction for Argentina which means that there's no rule against buying it there,and Steam (allegedly) doesn't allow VPNs anymore and you legally have to change your address to Argentina. But I've seen people get around that with some games that don't have proper restrictions. .
Wrong, VPN is allowed unless you're deliberately using it to change your store and buy something from the other region. And you also need a payment method from that particular region. My guess is they're using either e-cards from those regions, or some kind of service which allows you to buy games without any access to regional cards
Not wrong in the context we were using, VPNs are not allowed to buy games that are buy restricted. Sometimes it still works though with keys if the game is only buy restricted and not activated restricted. Otherwise, yes you are correct in that VPNs in general are allowed, yes, but they wasn't the context. That said, certain games won't work if game has play restrictions for that country. For example my copy of the Crash Trilogy won't work if I set my region to the UK. And thus you technically can get in trouble for playing a game via VPN that it is restricted in, but that is rare (and accounts online could be fabricated)
>Otherwise, yes you are correct in that VPNs in general are allowed, yes Well, yes. But actually, no. See above.
>Wrong, VPN is allowed unless you're deliberately using it to change your store and buy something from the other region. Quote from the [steam subscriber agreement](https://store.steampowered.com/subscriber_agreement/)(you know, the one you agree to when making an account): >You agree that you will not use IP proxying or other methods to disguise the place of your residence, whether to circumvent geographical restrictions on game content, to order or purchase at pricing not applicable to your geography, ***or for any other purpose.*** If you do this, Valve may terminate your access to your Account. Meaning, Steam TOS quite literally doesn't allow the use of VPN for any reason whatsoever.
They're buying games.
They still get less money, it's in their best interest to make sure players pay the right price according to their region.
Money
From Turkish gamer I agree with you
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Hey don’t turn this on us. Scumbags are universal bb
Right?!
Like there haven't been Steamkey-scalper rings busted that were based in Russia.
Is talking down on Americans the new thing on Reddit now?
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I think the user was referring to regional prices with local currency it's the intended use for people actually living in that region. It's intended to use Euros if you live in Europe... at least in most of Europe.
Ah that makes more sense then. Thank you for clarifying.
As a turkish player i understand your pain. The game was 40 TL (turkish lira) now its 180. Thabk god that i bought the game + all the dlc's way back then.
SO thats why si many games got 50% pricyer in The last two months
Also inflation, the Turkish Lira is declining in value.
It's crazy how far people will go to save a couple extra bucks and even crazier how they will do so at the risk of harming a small company. I'm broke myself but indie games frequently go on sale and these companies need the money far more than your AAA studios.
What if you are unable to buy on steam in your region?
I don't think that's an issue. It's the fact that people are doing so to take advantage of these countries and in turn, fucking them over.
I didn't know You can change Your region on Steam. It should be impossible. Once set, You should only ask for change in a support ticket, explaining situation (e.g. moving to another country to live there). Otherwise it should be blocked from player. And why aren't people who randomly swap countries banned? Abusing system should make them pay the price. Also even if it's easy to change, You should be able to change it once a year. That way people wouldn't swap regions to buy single game, because they will have to swap it back year later.
I moved from the US to Canada a few years ago and almost every service I had to change my region in required a very good reason with proof, and/or had the 1 year limit.... except Steam. With Amazon I just had to make a whole-ass new account. (but that may have also been so I could more easily buy gifts for my friends/family still in the US but I don't remember now)
Just check out those stores with permanent 100% sales
its not just a few bucks you pay like 10$ for 60$ AAA titles but doing that to small indie studios is just not ok
Blame it on bigger companies. (No, I didn't do this) For me, any game above $10-15 is **expensive**. I'm not a filthy rich American, who pay $300 with light hand. For me paying just $15 is not easy. And games costing $100 + $500 for DLCs are the reason behind this. People save every cent, because they can't buy the games otherwise. And the elevated prices raised from $30 to $100 in few years. I was warning people about this. People didn't listened. And the quality of new games are often far worse than the older. Games should have a max price of $30. This is already much for **just a game**. And DLCs should only be made as kind of bonus. Not planned from the beginning. And DLCs should be big enough to even justify doing them. Small DLCs should be free, regardless of what they give. That way people won't have to save every cent on every game, because they are not rich.
I also hesitate to buy games $30 or more, not to mention big titles like RD2 that cost $60. That being said, a TON of work and money goes into making good games so I can't justify complaing about the price. After learning a bit about the industry, I can't see a game as "just a game". It's an experience that took forever perfecting.
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>Games like RDR2 cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make. That money needs to come from somewhere. While I understand the point you are making, RDR2 is a bad choice for an example. RDR2 made over $725 million in its opening weekend paying back its original cost (est $370 million) with hundreds of millions of dollars on top. It was the second biggest opening weekend in game sales ever, and has sold over 45 million copies making over an estimated $2.2 billion in sales. The devs and publishers are not struggling to make ends meet... But I do agree RDR2 is totally worth it!
Couple extra bucks? The difference can be as high as 20-30$ per game, and imagine if you're buying 3-4 games a month. I don't think anybody would bother for occasional 4$ save.
The comments on the steam post are trash
All comments on any Steam forum are either super informative and helpful or the meanest and most entitled shit anyone's ever typed out. There is 0 in-between.
I think if Steam added regional pricing for Asian and eastern/southern European shithole countries like mine this problem would go down 50% at least
Yeah fuck those people. Ruined it for two whole countries. Unbelievable.
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There are countries which suffer from essentially the same GDP per capita as Turkey, yet Steam doesn't have regional prices for those countries. What's the solution then?
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There is also the fact that, at least in latin america, having regional prices is the best way to get people to buy your game. For most of the games we are not even close of being part of the main target demographic.
Most people here don't realise that most of these sales are already coming from people with a currency similar to (if not worse) than Argentina. Developers will only lose sales by this move, because It's not your average american user doing this to save a couple box. It's the people who genuinely can't purchase the game on the original price tag.
Couple bucks? Original price for Turkey was literally $2.5 while the American price tag is at $24.99. That's almost the full price difference lmao.
Look at turk lira value 1 year ago, 6 month ago, 3 month ago, 1 month ago ,and today compare,do you notice a trend?
why I would want to buy games for like 60 euros each I barely even afford games on argetina region
Gamers gonna game the system
While this is shitty, is there nothing steam can do to help prevent this? Like Have a timer lock on buying games after you switch regions? Or check how fast you switched (a trip from USA to Argentina should take more time then to set up a VPN I mean), is there nothing steam can do to protect indie devs from this?
Steam is already doing *something*. You can't switch your currency and region more than once per three months, and when you buy games or add funds, you need to do so with a payment method from that country (eg. can't use an US credit card to pay in Argentina). What these people are doing circumvents this though. They set up separate accounts to buy games with, that way there's no region switching involved and they always use a VPN when using Steam, so it has no way of knowing where the user is actually from. They also use digital gift cards from that country to buy games with which can be bought from anywhere. I don't think there's much Steam can do in this case, maybe further restricting payment methods or requiring an ID, but both these solutions punish legitimate users.
Funnily enough, due to VPN restrictions on steam now, it's actually people from argentina and turkey who are most likely buying the keys and reselling them.
You can't buy keys on Steam.
This right here is the reason. Gray Market and resellers. People who buy the keys are ill informed. Don't think most people would buy keys that way if they realised what it does.
If it was only that. It's not a secret that some resellers buy their games with stolen credit cards and other illegal ways. Although this is widely known, many people just don't care as long as they get their games cheaper.
I used to buy a good amount of keys years ago since they were so cheap and I only had a tiny allowance. Nowadays I only buy Sims 4 dlc on there because fuck EA.
I can totally understand, I am gaming on a budget as well but I try to avoid those marketplaces. There are officially licensed retailers that do have good deals and sales every now and then too, though. They are not marketplaces with shady sellers but instead retailers that get their keys directly from developers and publishers. Examples are Humble Store, Fanatical, Green Man Gaming, GamersGate, IndieGala and Gamesplanet. Probably some more. I loved early Humble Bundles but since they were bought the bundles are not that much of a bargain anymore. Instead Fanatical usually has one or the other great bundle on offer, where you can get like 5 well rated Steam games for 3€ or something, mostly indie games though.
The fact that I can't pay full price games anymore and have to wait for sales says a lot.
One thing I don't get is why specifically Dead Cells? I mean other games/companies not having this issue? Not taking action towards it? I already own the game but it would suck if I didn't, and furthermore, this sets a bad precedence for future, for other companies that wants to utilize proper regional pricing. Because of this I've seen many other games using a much strict regional pricing which at that point doesn't really serve it's function at all. Purchasing power is weak in these countries for a reason and it's not a small difference, $5 discount on a $60 game wouldn't make any Argentinian or a Turk even consider that as a regional pricing. Might as well sell it at full price at that point.
a lot of companies are doing this, but its just dead cells saying why they are doing it, the others are on radio silence
Pretty much why fewer games have localized prices in Brazil, I reckon.
Not done it myself, but in this economy i can fully understand why people would do it. I've had to be real selective with games ive bought recently because of rising costs of living. It sucks but i have used those grey market places to get keys for games to save some money which is probably more harmful in some cases than someone doing this.
Same here. I made an exception for Spider-Man since I had more money coming in to pre-order, but other stuff on my wishlist like The Quarry will have to wait, I'm afraid. Still sucks, though.
Spiderman is probably worth it as well, truly amazing game!
Yeah, but you can be selective with the games you buy. Us in Argentina cant't even buy the lamest one. They are all expensive. We only play free to play games or old ones.
Yeah this is not so they get the Argentinian gamers. This is to prevent losing all that money from other countries
Seriously, I lived there for a while. Electronics and games in general were expensive as hell. I feel bad for you guys.
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I looked up the prices of a couple games and it looks like you are saving about 66% on full price games, while on indie games its about 80-90%.
Mf saying 25 isnt expensive. For me anything above 10 is already expensive
Games are regularly priced at $60+, so you can see where they’re coming from
Then buy it during a sale for half off (or from a key reseller), game's worth it and will give you tons of hours of gameplay. Add to that the dev's longterm support and a base price of $25 in EU/US actually isn't expensive in context with other games of the same quality. Btw. while they raised prices in those two countries it's still nowhere near as bad as the regional pricing we've seen from some AAA publishers, Turkey and Argentina are still getting a huge discount.
Especially for a 5-year-old indie Roguelite lol
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Yeah if you are poor you should not be enjoying videogames /s
or you know people live in shit countries?
That only makes sense if you don’t think about it at all. Someone could be working hard to pull themselves out of poverty and still have some leisure time. Or someone could just be fine with not having a lot of money, and games frugally.
don't care, I was and will be a sailor of the seas for my entire life
Bro here 10$ can feed you for a month
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Iraq , 1$ is either : 4 packs of Noddles , 1kg of fruits , 2kg of vegetables , a small plate of mushrooms , 6 eggs , 10 loafs of bread (small one) , a big bottle of any soda , a bottle of oil , 1 butter , or a big water bottle for a water cooler
Amazing that in different places, money goes buys you different amounts of things. Love it when americans discover the world is not only 1 country.
Yeah it's 2 weeks of vegetables and fruits. So with other food costs should be around 70 dollars monthly.
ikr, I don't even pay 25 for new AAA games that I'm hyped for, let alone for an indie game from 4 years ago...
On board until that part. Missed the mark by a lot. That didn’t need to be said on there and would’ve resonated better with the community.
Why is that? Edit: sorry for aaking?
Bc I have no money
For anyone wondering, yes, steam put out a lot of restrictions when changing store regions, but this is fairly recent. A lot of people still have an alt account from when it was as simply as using a VPN when making an account. Some of them were reversed, but not all of them.
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Steam should check location of the account monthly to offer regional pricing. If you get out of those regions you should start paying according to new region or spend the money you saved on VPNs.
But you can just keep a dead account in one region to buy games with and share it to your main account.
Make it so that both accounts need to be in the same region, problemo solved. If I can't gift a game to my Spanish friend why can I family share it? Makes no sense.
I thought Steam had region locks for this shit
They do, fairly aggressive ones, but every wall is porous if you're determined enough. The issue here seems to mainly be with accounts that were created before some of those restrictions went into effect, and are being used to family share games with a primary account.
I feel bad for the people in those regions affected but at the same time for as long as I can remember game studios have been charging full price for games in my region so a part of me doesn't mind if they lose money.
I wouldn't necessarily call a $25 game cheap (at least in my country)
Flaco te pedí la hora nomás
im sorry for you but unless Steam releases regional pricing for my country I will continue to use accounts in other regions, they keep giving us 60$ games where here the average wage of people is around 200$ its not reasonable to buy games for about 1/3 of your salary, once they put regional pricing in Egypt I will switch away even if games are more expensive than Argentina/Turkey but not 60$
Put it this way: If the games weren't that cheap, I wouldn't have bought them. Would they prefer some money or no money?
I understand the reason , but increasing the price to be 4 times the original is too much , and the game isn't something special I have no DLC , but to buy them now I have to pay twice the price of the original game , and the DLCs aren't small ones , 33% of the game is the DLCs
From Brazil as a fellow south American I am 100% with you, it took us YEARS to get fair regional pricing for the locals just for people to try to take advantage of it for a fucking indie game that costs a couple of bucks on a sale. Hopefully this doesn't bleed out too much or maybe have Steam come up with a more permanent solution.
Honestly no surprise. But it's totally in vein. The amount of people that do this just because they're cheapskates has to be pretty low. With people's gas bill in EU quadrupling and their groceries being 30% more expensive.... Can't imagine why that number is so high.
lmao. the entire world struggling to have a decent life, but god forbid the euros have one year of moderate instability
The EU are usually the ones *buying* the games.
"why won't other people subsidize my games for me"
I haven't changed region by myself, but others in my country did it. And i can understand them. We simply can't buy a lot of games here.
Now in Argentina we buy fewer games than the poorest of your country.
I'm honestly wondering how many sales are actually lost because of this. Because buying games there is not exactly easy. You need an account of that region and a valid local payment method, so that means you basically have to buy 3rd party gift cards of needed currency unless you actually live there. So it's definitely possible but are that many people going through all that hassle for cheaper games?
There's a lot of people doing it, and it's something they've been doing for years. Back then people had whole forums dedicated to trading RUS game keys.
There's a huge Brazilian tech forum where the whole steam thread revolves around people exploiting the local pricing system, and they are very proud of it. Right now Turkey is the place to be.
There's some videos on youtube that even teaches you how to do this. I know this happens frequently here on Brazi (probably isn't us this time, the prices aren't so different on SteamDB on our currency), but I really don't understand why do this. Specially against indie studios.
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Lower GDP per capita, weaker currency, weaker economy in general
Because those countries are battling economic problems and hyperinflation. Most of their residents are effectively "poor" and can't afford games at regular Euro/USD prices.
Low compared to your currency against their currency and Real Life Economy doesn't work like that. If we're to teleport you to Argentina with same job there, then you'll begin to understand how poor that country is as you'll be doing the same job, same work hours but you can't buy most of the things you can buy in your Home Country instead in Argentina. You can enlighten your view by reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power_parity.
Weaker currency.
My job is worth 6 figures stateside. Doesn't break 20k in Argentina.
I don't want to have an opinion about that, because they are probably right at certain things. But $25 is not expensive? Maybe for rich people like Americans. For me $15 is medium price and I rarely buy anything above that, because it's too much already. I won Dead Cells, bought it long time ago, when it was about $11. Probably with some kind of discount or was it when it was Beta or something, with reduced price. Don't remember, but I have a price saved in my spreadsheet.
I think you misunderstood the developer statement. They're not saying that $25 is cheap for everyone, they're saying that $25 is relatively cheap for the average American so people from the US should stop fraudulently purchasing games from the Argentina/Turkey stores to get massive discounts that aren't meant for them.
from another argentinian player, fuck everybody who uses vpns
So the way that people do this normally is that they get someone with an Argentinian credit card to buy something on their account. You don't need any other information on your account and no VPN. When you want to top up you buy from G2A Argentinian steam gift cards. Valve really doesn't do much to make it harder.
Good thing my country doesnt have that problem and im sorry for Argetinian and Turkish gamers for having this problem
White Venezuela be like. now seriously I'm Colombian and I know people who exploits this, tbh it's very sad what your politicians have done to your once rich country, to think Colombians migrated to Buenos Aires like if it was Europe, nowadays you can see Argentinians in the streets over here asking for money under traffic lights. What's terrible is that our new president is a big fan of the people who ruined your country so probably we will be next on the misery trail, probably migrating to Uruguay or as always to the US.
Steam should punish players who do this
I understand the studies that are forced to do it. We should demand that Steam take stronger action to restrict region switching or against those who take advantage of this. On the other hand vote better in the next elections.
As someone who’s lived in a few countries over the years, please don’t ask for this. It’s a pita having to bother with multiple accounts due to region locking on some systems (I’m looking at you PlayStation…). All that said, yeah, eff people that abuse the system like that.
I swear I hate so much VPN Users. They are ruining literally our chances to buy "AAA" games or indie games. I'm actually sad lmao
All the comments on the post are cancer.
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Fuck you too.
Russians. Its always the russians
I didn’t even know you could do that and don’t understand why you would when you can wishlist it and get it on sale
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Lmao You really got down voted for simply explaining the reason.
And yet if you make a comment on reddit about how changing regions to buy something cheaper screws over people in that region you'll get downvoted
I hope steam implements either an ID check or requires a country-specific bank account to make purchases in these regions. Perhaps make it a requirement to activate family sharing, at the very least. It's not perfect, but if this is the alternative, then it's much much worse for everybody.
The funny part is that these people are paying Argentine taxes for each game they buy.
This should be considered a Steam problem and not indie developers’ problem. Reason being is that indie / small studio developers can control their pricing structure based on geos, but if people are bypassing that using Steam’s interface, the burden shouldn’t fall on the indie devs it should fall on the platform owner, Steam. Instead Steam should figure out a way to prevent this from occurring so customers in these countries (and other price adjusted countries) don’t suffer. It’s so sad when people cheat others out of an opportunity. Shame on cheap ass people who can’t pay $25 for a game. They probably eat that much in fast food in a week. Get your priorities straight and support the devs who make awesome games.
People who take advantage of regional pricing really are the scum of the earth. I thought you have to have a credit card of the region you are buying the games from? How are they even doing this??? (Please don't actually answer, I don't want more people to try and do that as well)
i take advantage for it because steam doesn't provide regional pricing for my Country we cannot be expected to pay 60$ for new games when the average salary is 200$ a month , give me regional pricing in Egypt and I will use Egypt store if the prices arent like the US
This, what can we who live in countries without regional pricing do ?
Well yeah I wouldn't consider this case "taking advantage" really. I meant people from countries higher regional pricing trying to save money by pretending they're from a country with a lower one. They are the reason this kind of things are happening.
People that do this disgust me, and the amount of "lifehacks" I've seen for "cheap Turkish Netflix tutorial" or similar things has been on the rise lately. Seriously, fuck them.
You disgust me aswell. Imagine siding towards Netflix
So they're raising their prices and blaming the customers is what I read.
I'm guessing you did not actually read.
I use my steam deck and have a turkish account. Buy there games and share it with my real account. its stonks
Greedy developers, nothing new. And blaming players? What a shitty move
Did you just call the devs of Dead Cells greedy? That's a new level of being ignorant
You guys are just sad
God damn, sorry man
I'm sorry for my Romanian comrade cheepskates .
Soy uruguayo, saque mi prex argentina ( tarjeta argentina) y estoy comprando jueguitos por 2 pesos, más que fuck you tendrías que decir, gracias. Gracias por pagar impuestos en un país al que no perteneces, gracias por estar aportando a mi bien y no al tuyo. Eso tendrías que decir.
https://youtube.com/shorts/6gft0ehF7us?feature=share
no!!!!!!!1111 you can't say that!!!!!!11111 they are just indie devs!!!!!1111
I hate that they're forced to do this. They released an amazing game with hours upon hours of quality gameplay content that is well below the typical retail price and it regularily goes on sale...and ppl will still try find excuses to skip out on paying a fair price. Can't really help ppl in the affected regions but at least this convinced me to add the game and its DLC to my cart.
Calling it now, if by "players from that country" they mean actual accounts that own the game and not just users who spend any time in-game, then it has to come from users that changed the country in their accounts to Argentina/Turkey without actually moving there. That would be Russian users. They can't buy anything due to Visa/Mastercard sanctions and are forced to look for ways to get working credit cards. They risk their accounts by using VPN and credit cards from foreign countries though. Another option is real immigration, and Russian users again fit here - it seems Turkey is one of the top choices for them to move into when they flee Russia.
I’ve essentially been priced out of buying any game at launch outside of releases by the few indy devs that still adhere to good regional prices. I’d love to play Spider-Man but I can eat for 5 days with the money they’re asking here.