I think the current region restriction options for giveaways need some rework, especially when even bundle sites offer restricted games.
There are often games that come unrestricted with the exclusion for very specific countries such Germany, Japan or Russia. How to deal with them?
The only way we can manage to give away those game is abusing the description field with the hope that someone will read that heading one bold text.
Fear not, my fellow gifters! Here's my idea!
Three options to pick:

  • No restriction
    Obviously for ROW gifts.

  • Redeemable from selected countries
    Our actual restriction system with the only difference of a multiple selection for countries.

  • Unredeemable from selected counties.
    For ROW gift with some excluded countries (e.g. Mad Max form HB, redeemable worldwide but Japan)

The only flaw I thought about might be the intentional restriction applied to ROW gifts.
Let's say, one hate one particular country and keeps it excluded even where the gift has no restrictions :/

Keep the comments flowing. Let's hear your opinion! ^_^

Here's one giveaway!

TL;DR: Better explained in pictures maybe?

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7 years ago*

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Will this make Steamgifts great again?

View Results
Yes.
No.

The only flaw I thought about might be the intentional restriction applied to ROW gifts.

You know you can already do this, right? ^_^

And for your "image example", where would you put Mad Max from HB? I couldn't find Japan there :P

Just noticed we have some groups in common like Beard-topia, Right Door, Box of Kittens ^_^

7 years ago*
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That's just a quick example I drew. Obviously, more regions need to be added :P

You know you can already do this, right? ^_^

Yeah, of course. The actual system is far away from being flawless. My suggestion might be used to exclude very selected countries on purpose, though. That's actually a mean behavior but we're already allowing gates from external sites, sometimes even with secret rules to pass. Dammit! I said I shouldn't bring SGTools drama in here D:

7 years ago
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Let's ban sgtools :P

7 years ago
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Good idea!

7 years ago
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Choosing multiple regions needs to be a thing on the giveaway creation page. That way, if you have a game that can be activated in any country except Germany, for example, you woulld check the allowed region radio buttons for all except Germany.

Frankly, it's a bit odd that selecting more than one radio button wasn't a thing from the start when it was first implemented.

7 years ago
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yeah, I made some post maybe a year ago about being able to select multiple regions. I had some Deep Silver games that were 'ROW' which for Deep Silver means all countries minus any country in EU (with the exceptions of Serbia & Montenegro).

It'd also be good for these games that have discounts that are limited by the US region price floor (0.49 for some 18 months). For some games this also applies to switzerland & south korea. Would be nice to be able to region restrict such deep discounted games to these countries,

7 years ago
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Great idea!

7 years ago
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You would think that a toggle-select system would be better. "Region(s) Allowed to Enter," and then let the creator muck it up by toggling a region on or off.

7 years ago
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You and the other staff gotta nag cg about it ;>, would be a great and I think rather easy thing to implement.

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7 years ago
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Thanks for the support!
Have a meerkat gif :)

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7 years ago
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7 years ago
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I'm a little puzzled. Is that a question, a complaint or anything else? I'm serious. No sarcasm intended.
I fail to see how this could be possibly worse than what an user has to perform while creating restricted giveaways. It can obviously be phrased clearer than my English, though. I still think my idea can save some trouble, especially by now, with the flood of Capcom's games with very particular restrictions such as ROW but Germany and Japan.


This was also something I had in mind way before the new gifting policy. In my opinion, still viable but could also need some rework :(

7 years ago*
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I'm jumping on the bandwagon. I have also been pushing for a change to region-selecting. Your first picture (without the "not redeemable from") is what I had in mind. If done right, you don't really need "not redeemable from" as a secondary exclusion.

7 years ago
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I have keys that have restrictions of not redeemable in CIS, not redeemable in Japan, not redeemable in Germany, not redeemable in Japan + Korea, and I think I had one with a not redeemable in SEA.
That last option would actually be quite useful, especially since Japanese publishers seem to get more and more games separated to ROW/Japan or ROW/SEA.

7 years ago
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You could simply omit CIS, Japan, Germany, et cetera. If the giveaway may only be entered by those countries you select, there is no need to select countries for omission. They are omitted by default.

7 years ago
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So you have finally joined those who'd want a checklist region option? That would be swell, yes.
Right now, since the admin seems to really not favouring this idea (at least I do not recall any comment for any thread that had this suggestion), this thread (and one of mine) was trying to come up with a less coding-intensive solution.

7 years ago
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"Finally?" I've been pushing for it since purchased keys with region restrictions became widespread. How long has that been? A year? Two? Anyway, it's been a regular discussion amongst Staff, but other issues have been more pressing.

7 years ago
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"Unredeemable from selected counties."
Would this then make giveaway creators to be at fault if they didn't know that the game couldn't be activated in Burundi because of their laws?

7 years ago
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That's something up to the staff to be decided. Unknown restrictions happen by now as well.
In such case, I guess support would grant a giveaway deletion without problems.
Burundi got special laws for games? :O

7 years ago
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Of course it would be great, if we could just duplicate the region restrictions that come with a key to our giveaways. For example, when Humble Bundle tells me this key won't work in Japan and RU/CIS, I would mark those regions as not eligable for my giveaway. But I fear we'd get a lot of people who'd restrict the giveaways to their ROW keys unnecessarily, simply because they don't like Russians or Germans. Maybe only ROW keys given away as such should give full CV and people would get less CV for each region checked out, no idea, maybe that would work...

7 years ago
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I like your idea since i´m more concerned about getting into trouble because the winner of my giveaway can´t redeem it due to region locks than other users abusing the system to stop me from entering their giveaway beacause i live in a certain country. I have some region locked keys and i´m not sure what to do with them. Write it into the description and hope the winner isn´t a dick and accepts a re-roll or just make it a giveaway that can only be entered from peopel that live in the same country like me? Both options make me feel uncomfortable.

7 years ago
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#BanAllRegions

7 years ago
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Quite frankly, I don't see it as 'abuse' to intentionally limit the game to specific countries, or restrict it from specific countries. People can already do that to a limited extent with the region-restrictions, if they so choose.

On the whole, I like the idea. The main concern I have is that it's potentially user-unfriendly: any American whose had to scroll through almost to the bottom of a country list to select 'United States' knows it's a pain in the neck, and would be even more of one to have to do that with multiple countries. As well, frustration or confusion could arise from countries that might be listed in multiple ways—consider 'Burma' or 'Myanmar'; or 'North Korea,' 'Korea, North,' or 'Korea, Democratic Republic of.' Both of these could be overcome, however, with a search-like system like the way the game to be given away is selected, whereby users could search for a country and have a selection come up: where Myanmar would come up no matter which name someone uses to search for it.

7 years ago
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Closed 3 years ago by Rauchen.