Valve has just made it tougher for you to purchase games on Steam from a different country than the one you’re actually living in.
As most of us know, prices for various products can vary wildly depending on where you’re buying said product. That’s true for everything from automobiles to video games, and on no digital platform is it more true than Steam.
Just this past winter, a glitch in Steam caused Assassin’s Creed Unity to jump up to $84,000 in Malaysia. This was likely just due to a typo, but it’s hardly the only instance where the price varied. In Indonesia, you could buy Assassin’s Creed Unity for just 28 Rupees, or roughly one-fifth of an American cent.
Prices don’t always vary due to an error, however. The same game could be purchased in Hong Kong for about $5 USD last February due to lockdowns and the Chinese government attempting to quell unrest by just giving everyone access to cheap games.
Cheap pricing of games in other countries can be a problem for storefronts. Normally, digital stores simply determine the buyer’s home country based on where their internet signal originates, but VPNs allow users to route their signal through whatever country they wish. This allows tech-savvy users to get better deals on games by spoofing their country to wherever they can get the best deal.
But no longer. Steam just changed the rules so that it’s not so easy to buy a game from a different country. Now, in order to purchase a game, you need to provide a payment option from within the country you wish to buy that game. This means you not only have to use a VPN, you also have to open a bank account in Bolivia to pay with Bolivianos (that’s the Bolivian currency, in case you were wondering).
While this will likely shut down VPN users trying to get cheap games, it will also likely help poorer countries maintain access to PC games at a cheaper price. Rock, Paper, Shotgun notes a recent case with Horizon: Zero Dawn where prices for a game in one country shot up to be unaffordable for most of its populace simply because VPN users all flocked to that country to scoop up a good deal. This forced the publisher to raise prices in order to keep from getting swindled, but it also left poor residents in the cold.
Source: SteamDB on Twitter, Rock, Paper, Shotgun