Changing your country on Steam has been made harder to battle VPNs

Quoting: eldaking

Quoting: KimyrielleI guess that's part of the "Globalization is for big business, not customers!" textbook. Apparently it's totally fine for a US company to ship your job to Vietnam because wages there are a fraction of what they are here, but if a customer goes "Ok, I can make that work for me too, and shop where it's cheaper!", the same companies go "Oh no, YOU can't do that. Only WE can!"

Too funny.

Getting slightly off-topic, but I disagree a lot with how this is framed. This "Americans lose jobs to people that receive lower wages" is a load of bull; the person receiving poverty wages is not "taking your job", they are being exploited by your country. If an American wants that job, he can take it - I assure you immigration is a lot easier in that direction. As a bonus, you get their prices for videogames... People in the US benefit the most from the cost reductions of exploited labor; implying that US customers, of all the people in the world, can't benefit from globalization is not quite right.

This is a very literal "first world problem"...

Yes, globalization is for big businesses. They can set up a company in the US, pay taxes in Ireland, dispose of their garbage in China, exploit workers in Mexico, and get IT support from India. But for the people whose country is the one with all the big businesses, the right thing is to have more solidarity for the fellow workers of other countries, not thinking about how they get "cheaper" (not really) videogames.

All very true . . . and yet, US citizens on average are not better off when US corporations offshore jobs. That's not who the corporations are doing it for; profits are made but they go to the top. Rather, the average citizen is worse off when that happens, for a variety of reasons. It's certainly not the fault of the people in those other countries where the sweatshops get set up, who are often also worse off, but it's still the case.
So people in the US, or Canada in my case, certainly have reason to be upset when "free trade" results in local industries being destroyed, the jobs associated with them disappearing, the increased unemployment leading to downward wage pressures and so on. Sure, it might still be better (so far) to be unemployed or working gig jobs in Canada than working in the sweatshop in Indonesia where the manufacturing went . . . but that's not a reason to be OK with well paid longer term jobs going away from Canada.
Meanwhile in places like Indonesia, the reason there's tons of people more or less "willing" to work in those sweatshops is typically that they'd be better off as subsistence farmers but they got thrown off their land so someone could have a profitable plantation (and so they'd have no choice but to work in those sweatshops). The "free trade" is bad for both places. They'd be better off skipping the foreign-owned factories paying a pittance and sucking the profits out of the country, and instead doing locally owned import substitution. But the local wealthy comprador class get a cut, so change ain't gonna come easy.

Referring to the other conversation going on, Argentina is actually a case of a country that did prosper from import substitution, building up a solid local manufacturing sector . . . for a while, until the Americans managed to bring in some neoliberal types who got rid of the trade barriers that kept it going (and even for some time pegged the currency to the US dollar, so they couldn't make imports more expensive by devaluing), causing much of the local manufacturing to collapse. So they were back to hoping that various agricultural commodities would command good prices in any given year . . . sometimes they do, sometimes they don't.


Last edited by Purple Library Guy on 2 August 2020 at 7:05 am UTC

QuoteWhy 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.

What a crock of s#*t.

Australia pays anywhere up to quadruple what the USA pays for games / software (I'm talking across the board - not just for Steam)... But I'm pretty sure our incomes are not that much more than the USA!

Heck, if our incomes are so high that the game industry can justify up to quadruple the price for games / software, I must be getting the short end of the stick by a huge margin... Meanwhile, back on Earth, developers come up with a laundry list of "legitimate" reasons why they change so much - but 90% of those reasons actually can't be justified!

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Quoting: kadogoBut it's sure there are some stupid things like having S1 but not S2 but it's not available in the country at all...

Coming from an anti-piracy guy (yeah, there's a few of us left!), it's times like those when piracy is actually justified... If you're not going to make the content available for purchase or streaming, then I'm gonna have no sympathy for you when people steal your s#*t.

Me personally, I just don't bother - I generally don't watch television series until they're available on Blu-Ray Disc, because there's nothing worse than getting into a series and needing to wait 6-12+ months for the next part... If they make it at all.

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Quoting: LinasSomehow feels arbitrary and fake in the global economy.

This.

Here in Australia, we pay anywhere up to quadruple the price for digital goods (though it can be up to octuple the price, in rare cases)... And the Government conducts an investigation into why this is every few years.

As is to be expected, all of the big companies throw out their "legitimate" reasons why this is - unsurprisingly, none of them stand up.

The Government points out that we're effectively paying extravagant prices for illegitimate reasons, promises to do something about it and nothing happens... Rinse and repeat.

The point is, every time this happens, it is proven that prices are inflated without any actual reason to justify said price inflation.

It's all a big scam to convince "the little guy" who is either not smart enough to realize he's being duped, or too lazy to do anything about it... Unfortunately, that covers 99% of the population.

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Quoting: The_Aquabat

Quoting: LinasSomehow feels arbitrary and fake in the global economy.

well you could argue that world economy is rigged and this pandemia has shown the worst of it with oil prices falling down like never before, the price was really arbitrary all the way.

Of course it is... And it's rigged in the favor of the wealthy.

Same story as always - "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer!"

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Quoting: eldakingThis looks like you never had to deal with currency exchange. Exchange rates fluctuate wildly, and it is just not feasible to have prices jump around that much. Checking prices daily to see if something is cheaper, not being able to wait for a sale because who knows how much it will cost by then, speculating about the economy to know if it will go up or down in the next few months... nothing works like this.

Bulldust.

We buy a lot of stuff from overseas and when it comes to electronics, we buy approximately 85% of our stuff from overseas... Almost all of the companies we buy from - which are often major companies - have a fixed price and I just pay whatever it converts to in Australian Dollars + shipping (interestingly, it's often still cheaper to do this than to buy said product locally!).

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Quoting: KimyrielleI guess that's part of the "Globalization is for big business, not customers!" textbook. Apparently it's totally fine for a US company to ship your job to Vietnam because wages there are a fraction of what they are here, but if a customer goes "Ok, I can make that work for me too, and shop where it's cheaper!", the same companies go "Oh no, YOU can't do that. Only WE can!"

Too funny.

One rule for the wealthy, one rule for the regular folks... Besides, businesses often keep politicians in power, which has a lot to do with this.

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Quoting: eldakingThis "Americans lose jobs to people that receive lower wages" is a load of bull; the person receiving poverty wages is not "taking your job", they are being exploited by your country.

This is both wrong and right... Yes, people in these third-world countries are being exploited by Western Countries, but they're still taking jobs away from said Western Countries, too.

I just changed telecommunications service providers, primarily because all of their customer service is based in Australia, using Australian employees... That means I could get a job there, if I lived in Victoria (I live in a different state).

Had they opted to use foreign call centers in India or the Philippines - like pretty much everyone else - I would not be able to get said job without relocating to another country... Thus, taking my job.


Last edited by Cyba.Cowboy on 2 August 2020 at 1:09 pm UTC

Quoting: Purple Library GuyAll very true . . . and yet, US citizens on average are not better off when US corporations offshore jobs. That's not who the corporations are doing it for; profits are made but they go to the top. Rather, the average citizen is worse off when that happens, for a variety of reasons. It's certainly not the fault of the people in those other countries where the sweatshops get set up, who are often also worse off, but it's still the case.
So people in the US, or Canada in my case, certainly have reason to be upset when "free trade" results in local industries being destroyed, the jobs associated with them disappearing, the increased unemployment leading to downward wage pressures and so on. Sure, it might still be better (so far) to be unemployed or working gig jobs in Canada than working in the sweatshop in Indonesia where the manufacturing went . . . but that's not a reason to be OK with well paid longer term jobs going away from Canada.
Meanwhile in places like Indonesia, the reason there's tons of people more or less "willing" to work in those sweatshops is typically that they'd be better off as subsistence farmers but they got thrown off their land so someone could have a profitable plantation (and so they'd have no choice but to work in those sweatshops). The "free trade" is bad for both places. They'd be better off skipping the foreign-owned factories paying a pittance and sucking the profits out of the country, and instead doing locally owned import substitution. But the local wealthy comprador class get a cut, so change ain't gonna come easy.

People on developed countries do benefit from the imperialistic global trade they countries often impose to others. There are several well-paying jobs that are concentrated on those countries as a result of this "division of labor" in which some countries get all the sweatshops and unqualified jobs but all the actual management and research and design are actually done in other countries - that also get the benefits of both cheap imported primary products and locally produced high-tech goods. They also elect governments that "defends their interests", for example by creating the very same legal protections it strips away from people in other countries. They can afford to ignore, for example, the environmental damage their corporations deal to foreign countries, while still working for those corporations in a "local" job.

Of course, the gap between the common worker and the corporate class is still huge and much larger than the differences across workers of different countries, and it would indeed be better for everyone to oppose the interests of the big corps. It is in the best interests of the average citizen to stop the global exploitation of corporations.

But it is naive to think that, in "colonial" relations between countries, only the very top class is benefiting... or supporting it. It is most clear when people support "America first" policies (or their equivalent) - aggressive foreign policies with obvious repercussions in other countries, but they get to benefit from the "economic growth", local jobs, and so on. Other people are taking the lion's share of the profits (through direct exploitation, lobbying, etc), sure, but there is a difference between "exploited to work in sweatshops" or "denied medical supplies" and "got a smaller share of the plunder from the US-sponsored coup that kept fruit prices low".

Quoting: slapin

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: slapinWell, in case of Ubisoft or when you either VPN or torrent, this choice will bias things towards torrent which I don't like. I wonder why Sony Playstation managed to do it right and Steam can't do it...

What do you mean by "Sony Playstation managed to do it right"? AFAIK they have both regional locking and prices.

Sony made sure everyone gets the same content for regional prices, so you do not get poorly localized version without ability to switch to original language. On playstation you get the same game with all the stuff in it, not crippled version.

If you speak one of the major languages yes, for my language there exists close to zero games on either platform unless it's something that is targeted for very small children (and even then most of the time English is the only option).

Quoting: eldakingBut it is naive to think that, in "colonial" relations between countries, only the very top class is benefiting... or supporting it. It is most clear when people support "America first" policies (or their equivalent) - aggressive foreign policies with obvious repercussions in other countries, but they get to benefit from the "economic growth", local jobs, and so on. Other people are taking the lion's share of the profits (through direct exploitation, lobbying, etc), sure, but there is a difference between "exploited to work in sweatshops" or "denied medical supplies" and "got a smaller share of the plunder from the US-sponsored coup that kept fruit prices low".

You are conflating two different phenomena. Yes, US citizens benefit when US-sponsored coups keep fruit prices low. That is, where countries are coerced to produce things for export that could not be produced in the US in the first place (bananas, coffee, local mineral resources) and to hand them over for cheap.

US citizens do not benefit when US-sponsored coups and coerced trade deals create a situation where capital can readily arbitrage wages across countries. Yes, they get some cheap goods at Wal-mart, but their losses in wages among other things far more than make up for that. This loss is both direct, in that the manufacturing jobs themselves went somewhere else, and indirect, in that the bargaining power of labour is greatly weakened. When capital is very mobile and there are no trade barriers, it creates fairly direct competition between a wealthy country's labour and poor countries' labour--corporations can credibly threaten to move production elsewhere, and at the political level all kinds of social supports, labour rights, health and safety rules etc. can be evaluated in terms of "competitiveness" with those other places. Indeed, half the point of the whole exercise is not the production that happens in the poor countries, it's breaking the unions and cowing the left-of-centre political parties in the rich countries; "there is no alternative". If there are multiple poor countries, it also forces their wages, environmental standards and so on into competition with each other, making it harder for them, too, to improve living standards.

Old style imperialist coups for cheap resources are still going on; case in point, Bolivia. US consumers will no doubt benefit from that, at the direct expense of the Bolivians, if they can't reverse it. But if you look at the impact of NAFTA, it had negative impacts on the ordinary citizens of all three countries--Mexicans because their corn farmers couldn't compete with massively subsidized American (GMO) corn and so they had to flee to the cities and find sweatshop work in foreign-owned maquiladoras (or in prostitution, or drug dealing etc). Americans and Canadians because, just as Ross Perot predicted, there was a giant sucking sound as good union jobs went south and the manufacturing heartland turned into the "rust belt".

Offshoring production via neoliberal free trade is, as it were, imperialism come home to roost--it is an effort by elites to gain at the expense of the lower classes of rich and poor countries alike. It is distinct from classic imperialism even though the same people are often doing it at the same time.


Last edited by Purple Library Guy on 2 August 2020 at 6:48 pm UTC

Quoting: The_Aquabatthis

Quoting: Purple Library Guyimport substitution

you sound you would agree with our politicians current stuff, they mention "import substitution" like in every sentence. Meanwhile electronics and pc parts are the most expensive in the world. (according to the Ipad Index

I'm generally a fan of import substitution. But it's a lot easier to say than to do. Putting up a few trade barriers (like, say, Trump is doing) ain't enough. You need a whole set of industrial policies effectively put into practice, from education and training to targeted subsidies to R&D, co-ordination of industry, in some cases you even need to have the government directly start firms, you have to cope with the importers getting upset, and in today's context you also have to deal with the inevitable sanctions, currency attacks and so on when the US and allies get upset. So I can well believe your government may be doing the rhetoric of import substitution without managing the substance.
Mind you, even at best, it will make some things expensive for a while. You don't start off with your fledgling electronics biz or whatever being as good as the Japanese. Neither did the Japanese, though.

Quoting: The_Aquabatman I agree with your overall idea....workers rights are important, but you don't understand the situation here, Union leaders are so corrupt that they make Jimmy Hoffa look as an amateur.

I don't doubt you. There are so many ways in this world for things to get fucked up.

Quoting: Purple Library GuyYou are conflating two different phenomena. Yes, US citizens benefit when US-sponsored coups keep fruit prices low. That is, where countries are coerced to produce things for export that could not be produced in the US in the first place (bananas, coffee, local mineral resources) and to hand them over for cheap.

US citizens do not benefit when US-sponsored coups and coerced trade deals create a situation where capital can readily arbitrage wages across countries. Yes, they get some cheap goods at Wal-mart, but their losses in wages among other things far more than make up for that. This loss is both direct, in that the manufacturing jobs themselves went somewhere else, and indirect, in that the bargaining power of labour is greatly weakened. When capital is very mobile and there are no trade barriers, it creates fairly direct competition between a wealthy country's labour and poor countries' labour--corporations can credibly threaten to move production elsewhere, and at the political level all kinds of social supports, labour rights, health and safety rules etc. can be evaluated in terms of "competitiveness" with those other places. Indeed, half the point of the whole exercise is not the production that happens in the poor countries, it's breaking the unions and cowing the left-of-centre political parties in the rich countries; "there is no alternative". If there are multiple poor countries, it also forces their wages, environmental standards and so on into competition with each other, making it harder for them, too, to improve living standards.

Old style imperialist coups for cheap resources are still going on; case in point, Bolivia. US consumers will no doubt benefit from that, at the direct expense of the Bolivians, if they can't reverse it. But if you look at the impact of NAFTA, it had negative impacts on the ordinary citizens of all three countries--Mexicans because their corn farmers couldn't compete with massively subsidized American (GMO) corn and so they had to flee to the cities and find sweatshop work in foreign-owned maquiladoras (or in prostitution, or drug dealing etc). Americans and Canadians because, just as Ross Perot predicted, there was a giant sucking sound as good union jobs went south and the manufacturing heartland turned into the "rust belt".

Offshoring production via neoliberal free trade is, as it were, imperialism come home to roost--it is an effort by elites to gain at the expense of the lower classes of rich and poor countries alike. It is distinct from classic imperialism even though the same people are often doing it at the same time.

I'm not conflating the two things - there are two different hierarchies at play; one created by neocolonialism, another created by class division. They intersect so that you can be screwed at the same by the elites of your own country and by the foreign policy of developed countries.

It's not just coups. There are acquisitions of local companies, strangling local industry by subsidizing high-tech goods, qualified jobs moving to other countries and brain drain, less strict environmental regulations, lobbying for regulations, unequal trade deals...

I think it is important for people in developed countries to realize that some global injustices actually benefit them, even if they are not well off in the overall. Because there are demagogues whose rhetoric will blame the most exploited for issues - "the reason you have it hard is because people over there accept wages that are too low, you are losing your job to them", and the result is screwing people twice over. When there are people in sweatshops, and someone frames the issue not as about those people but about "losing jobs" (in a country that is relatively much better off overall), it is very bad. This is what led me into this tangent in the first place.

Quoting: The_Aquabatfunny I worked for a call center (a very big company) that sells pc parts in the USA here in my third world country and never fell exploited. USA or western countries exploiting others it's just a stereotype, globalization is good and have brought progress to the world economy like never before, global poverty is record low. I'm not saying that explotation doesn't exist but when you account and balance globalization, the benefits surpass the negative stuff.

I live in Argentina too and we probably read the same history so, we both know that we had many episodes were USA and other big countries did nasty things in order exploit us (we even had a murder inside the senate related to this actions). "USA or western countries exploits others countries" != "USA or western countries inversions in other countries are always for exploiting them". Subtle but a big difference.

I can understand that many are upset by having to pay a different price in their countries, but always remember that the minimum wage and life standards can be VERY different between your countries and the ones that are paying less. The problem is not that someone is asking too much money for their product, the problem is that in other countries we get way less income per month.

I definitely think this is not a fair use for VPN's. In countries with lower standards of living, people shouldn't need to pay as much for their games as me. Employees supporting local communities/running local servers/etc is more expensive here in western Europe, and consequently we pay more. So Steam battling this is definitely fair.

However, differing pricing schemes is a completely different topic to me from geoblocking.. If I want to watch a certain sports event, but no broadcaster from my country broadcasts it, but I'm not allowed to watch it from a foreign broadcaster, that's just plain idiocy. Being behind on a certain TV-show while you want to discuss it on the internet, or while you may get spoilers on the internet, just because another Amazon Prime has the rights in your country but Netflix has exclusive rights for the first week, that's just plain stupid. It goes against (one of) the promise(s) of internet. Internet should be a way to give as many people as possible access to as much information/content as possible. Bringing content to lower-income regions for lower prices does exactly that.

[quote=The_Aquabat]

Quotebtw, as I said "Third World" is an outdated definition from the Cold War, per definition Ireland, Austria, Sweden, Finland, Switzerland and Yugoslavia, are "Third World". It's just as awkward as using "Axis" and "Allies" from the 2nd world war to categorise countries. The Berlin Wall has fallen it's ridiculous to still use that definition.

You have a point.

I remember reading an unrelated news article the other day, that was saying China is technically a "third-world" country, based on the outdated definitions of a "third-world" country... But we all know that in reality, this couldn't be further from the truth (which was part of what the article was talking about).

A better term would be "country with lower wages"... Some of the countries in which call centers operate actually have a lot of money (not as much as say, America; but a lot), so even if "third world" still was technically an accurate term, it wouldn't necessarily apply all cases where call centers operate.