Something that has been happening for years now, is that people have been switching around their country on Steam and using VPNs to get cheaper prices - Valve looks to have put a stop to it.
Why was this a thing? Thanks to regional pricing, countries that typically have lower incomes can enjoy the same games as others with lower prices to match. Being able to get around that to buy cheaper games using a VPN was a bit of a loophole, which has been sorted by Valve.
Spotted by SteamDB, It's not entirely clear when this actually went live for everyone. Checking it myself, changing country on Steam is now a bit more involved. Previously it was quite easy with a VPN but if you did it too often, Valve would put you on a cool-down from doing so for a while. Now it seems everyone has the same full enforcement. After changing country, you then need to make a purchase from a payment method registered to that country.
It makes sense for Valve to sort it, otherwise developers have had to adjust prices in other regions to match resulting in people from countries with lower incomes ending up with higher prices. This is apparently exactly happened with Horizon Zero Dawn according to VG247, and when you check on SteamDB you can see the prices across countries like Argentina and Turkey rocket upwards.
Using a VPN or proxy to get around it, was actually already against Steam's Terms of Service, with Valve saying if found out they may place "restrictions" on your account.
What are your thoughts on this?
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
That said, there may be issues of infrastructure and delivery (I can imagine some) that could potentially make this issue a bit more tricky to work around for a streaming service than a storefront.
For Streaming services it's more a license issue because there are region restriction because other infrastructure may have the show/movie. But it's sure there are some stupid things like having S1 but not S2 but it's not available in the country at all...
I hope on day we get rid of region license but it's not for soon sadly...
Last edited by fryk on 31 July 2020 at 9:37 am UTC
Quoting: frykThats strange, I don't think this is that new.Neither do I. My family lives in another country that crosses the Steam pricing region. When I was buying a game while visiting, Steam showed me a warning, and asked to confirm which country I actually live in. That was a few years ago.
Last edited by Linas on 31 July 2020 at 10:25 am UTC
Quoting: LinasThe difference is now, it's being properly enforced. Before they had things like temporary country-change cooldowns, now it won't let you do anything until you make a purchase with something registered in that country.Quoting: frykThats strange, I don't think this is that new.Neither do I. My family lives in another country that crosses the Steam pricing region. When I was buying a game while visiting, Steam showed me a warning, and asked to confirm which country I actually live in. That was a few years ago.
Quoting: AppelsinI'm actually in favour of such a solution, as opposed to the blanket blocking of VPNs, which is how it's done by Netflix and their ilk. There it doesn't matter if you're VPN-ing from your resident country, you're still blocked on general principle.the thing about Netflix and co is they have to do it because of stupid licensing... Country-x might have the "rights" to broadcast something and as a result no one else may and that includes streaming. PITA but its stupid exclusive broadcasting issues.
That said, there may be issues of infrastructure and delivery (I can imagine some) that could potentially make this issue a bit more tricky to work around for a streaming service than a storefront.
for games and software its different and yes this makes sense. the subtly in the valve costing was abused by Epic and their PR against why they are cheaper and give more back to developers
Quoting: LinasTo be honest, it has always escaped me how games in e.g. Russia cost like 10% of what we pay in the EU. I mean, I do get that purchasing power and salaries are very different, but we are talking about digital goods. It takes whatever amount of money it takes to make a game, in whatever country is was made. It's not like the prices in Russia are lower because it is somehow cheaper to distribute them in Russia. Somehow feels arbitrary and fake in the global economy.
Well, you sell people things at the price at which they'll buy it, not at the price that's fair.
Quoting: The_AquabatQuoting: LinasIt's not like the prices in Russia are lower because it is somehow cheaper to distribute them in Russia.maybe it has something to do with piracy? here piracy is as bad as Russia.
It's not related to piracy. It's just related with the concept of marginal cost and marginal revenue in software.
Marginal cost defines the cost associated to produce one extra unit of my product (the extra money I have to pay to produce a new unit). Marginal revenue is the revenue that I get by selling one extra copy. What it's important to note here is that MC & MR usually aren't constant.
Now, if you move to a software scenario you will see that the marginal cost tends to be zero, which implies that the marginal revenue will always be bigger that MC (each time you sell an extra copy, you will always get revenue). So, taking this results to a supply and demand curve, you will find that the total revenue is proportional to the number of units you can sell at a specific price in a specific region, making the maximum profit directly proportional to the selling price you set in that region.
In more human friendly words: in software the max revenue point for a selling price varies between countries so if you want to maximize your global revenue you have to maximize the [Unit Sold] X [Unit Price] equation of each country. So that's why regional prices exists.
Worth mention: a big factor here is Steam. They are the ones that makes possible that the distribution of a game in a new region has zero cost for the publisher.
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