More Regional Restrictions come to Steam

More Regional Restrictions come to Steam

| Source: Steam Author: Mark Campbell

More Regional Restrictions come to Steam

More regional restrictions come to Steam in order to combat Steam gift reselling between regions and the use of VPNs in order to get games at a cheaper price.

This does not apply to all games, as Valve says in their support post on Region Restrictions. Whether or not game keys will be region restricted on Steam, as CD keys from other retailers or Gifts will be down to the publisher involved as there is no universal restrictions in place.

To be clear, restricted games can be activated via VPN, but will only be playable within the regions they are restricted too.

This change will mostly affect those who use VPNs or use so-called "gray market key resellers" in order to get new games at a cheaper price. Sadly this will also affect users who mover from these restricted regions to other places in the world, especially if they have a large steam library as when they move a lot of games may stop working for them. Not all games will be affected by this change but expect a lot of future titles to be region restricted, especially first party Valve titles..

Region restricted gifts will be shown in your gift library like in the image below. The same red notification will be shown to you before you accept a trade for a restricted game.

In order to get a region restricted game to work outside of the redeemable countries, Steam users will have to purchase the game again in your own region.

In my opinion Valve could have gone about this in a different way, as this will likely be very annoying to gamers who live in these regions, especially if they are looking to migrate. If Steam allowed users to migrate their entire library of games to a different region and perhaps only allow it to do done once or twice in a restricted timeframe. Again this is something Valve could easily implement if it worked to improve it's customer support, which is in dire need of reform.

You can join the discussion on Steam's additional region restrictions on the OC3D Forums.

More regional restrictions come to Steam in order to combat the use of VPNs. http://t.co/j3uyZScwKZ pic.twitter.com/A7nXeYXS3k — OC3D (@OC3D) March 13, 2015

1 - More Regional Restrictions come to Steam «Prev 1 Next»

Most Recent Comments