Valve Changes Rules To Further Prevent Bargain Hunters From Region-Hopping On Steam
Valve has changed the rules once again to make it even harder for VPN users to change their region for better deals on Steam.
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Back in the summer of last year, Valve finally addressed a long-standing issue with Steam by creating rules surrounding payment options. No longer would users be able to simply set their region to whatever they wanted through the use of a VPN in order to find a better deal for Steam games. Instead, users had to provide a payment option from within the local region in order to purchase games.
This effectively meant that someone couldn’t simply change their country to Nigeria to take advantage of cheaper prices on Steam. Without some sort of bank account or payment option that was physically located in Nigeria (or wherever the user sets their region) transactions wouldn’t go through.
Before you go thinking this was all just to prevent Valve from losing out on potential dollars, there’s a real problem if everyone just hops onto a VPN to find cheaper prices. Many poorer countries have cheaper priced games precisely because the locals can’t afford to pay more. If customers from richer countries flood into poorer ones, publishers are forced to raise prices in the poorer countries to prevent deal-seekers from killing their income, which raises the price of games in those countries out of reach of their actual residents.
The issue wasn’t entirely solved by forcing payment options on Steam users, so Valve has taken a further step today to crack down on region hopping. As reported by SteamDB, Steam now has a limit on how often you can change your Steam account’s country of origin to just one swap every three months. Payments still need to be processed in their country of origin.
This change prevents people from simply opening accounts in nearby countries by preventing the actual region-swapping in the first place.
Globe trotters might not like the Steam changes, but if you’re looking for revenge on Valve, Sweden has recently denied the Washington-based company from hosting The International in Stockholm in August. So even Valve can get region-locked.
Link Source : https://www.thegamer.com/valve-region-hopping-steam-limit/