They’re getting rid of the physical gift cards aren’t they? This makes sense given that’s happening
The title says “No Region Restrictions Anymore”. In the article they have this quote:
The recipient of the gift must also live in the same country as the purchaser
Now which one is it?edit: Actually going through the link to the announcement Valve wrote this:
Cross-region gifting
Buying a gift for a friend in a higher-priced region? In the past, digital gift cards were the solution for gifting, but that required you to know the full price of the game in your friend’s region.
Now you can gift games directly to your friend. Steam will calculate the cost in your friend’s region at checkout. Your friend needs to be on your Steam friends list to send this type of gift.The article’s authors just failed to insert the correct quote.
So find a friend in a region where games are cheap, buy them some games you want to play and get them to turn on family sharing (or whatever its called)?
That will make up somewhat for the fact that Steam physical gift cards are going away.
To be fair, I don’t blame steam for getting rid of them. Although I haven’t seen any personally, I have seen more than my fair share of Google Play gift card scams. If steam gift cards are used in the same way, I am ok with them going away.
Glad this update is a thing, picks up the slack, but reducing scams is always good.
Next up loot boxes?
The downside to physical gift cards being discontinued is that Valve is now even more dependent on credit card companies. With physical cards in stores, they at least had something to fall back on for when cc companies try to manipulate them again
Yeah I don’t understand this. The cards also dont need to physically exist. The code can just be printed on the receipt when buying from the register.
Any chance they can get rid of region-locked keys while they’re at it? I hate seeing deals on games I want just to find out I can’t activate it where I’m living.
No way, and please don’t. Region locked keys exist so that they support Regional Pricing, which makes it so that games are relatively priced based on the economy they are being sold to, a huge reason of why Steam “solved” the piracy issue of games on PC. It works the way it does so that people from those countries can have fair access, while people from a country with a better economy aren’t able to use a VPN or something like that to buy games for cheaper.
I doubt it, because that would bring back VPN deal tunnelling that Valve doesn’t want to endorse (because the regional discounts are meant to scale with the purchasing power of the citizens in each region, not for people from the west going on gray market sites to grab games from Ukraine/Russia/Brazil/Argentina).
It specifically mentions that the receiver of the gift must be from the same region. So I would agree that this (probably rightfully) isn’t happening.
That is incorrect, even though it was written as such in the article. According to the Valve source they point to, the gift’scost is calculated at checkout based on the receiver’s region. You can gift to any other region, as long as the game is available there
