With regional pricing, games on Steam are usually not outlandishly expensive. That being said, countries with higher purchasing power could get games at lower prices by changing their location to another country. Steam is putting a stop to this by tying payment methods to the store country you set it to.
This was spotted by @SteamDB, with the discovery being shared on Twitter. Essentially, you can only switch your Steam country setting if you have a payment method from that country. And you can only make that change after you’ve made your first purchase using that country’s currency.
Valve has recently made changing your store country more strict, which requires completing a purchase using a payment method from that country.
This should hinder the ability of using VPNs to buy games cheaper. pic.twitter.com/IozwoO6gsi
— Steam Database (@SteamDB) July 29, 2020
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Normally, this wouldn’t be a problem for us, as our prices are usually a little lower than the US prices. But in the odd occasion that Steam’s prices bug out, you could see our prices go extremely high, while other regions see their prices go extremely low. A recent episode was with Assassin’s Creed Unity.
As mentioned, in terms of prices, this wouldn’t change much for use. The real casualty here would be games that are region locked, with our region being locked out of certain games’ availability. One unfortunate example is Phantasy Star Online 2, which will not be available to us.
(Source: SteamDB / Twitter)
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