It's not as straight forward as that. The price difference between regions that allows gifting is 10% - for example, if a Canadian game is 9% cheaper than it's US equivalent, they can still gift to US gamers, whereas if it's 11% cheaper they can't (not to mention this can change based on the exchange rates that Steam uses). And price differences between regions don't have the same gap - certain publishers will charge differently.
I think you would have to do something like this:
Select the game. Upon selection, data is fetched for all the regions and their currencies and are marked according to whether that game can be gifted to that region, with the list of countries that can't showing up. Then when the giveaway is created, there will be an automatic description (or it can be a separate 2nd description for region restrictions) that says which regions cannot join the giveaway.
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True, but it varies from game to game. There are games where continental Europe is so much cheaper than NA that we cannot gift them there. In some other cases, the EUR price is so fucked up, Muricans and Canucks cannot give the game to us. And this is just covering the two largest and most populated and most active ROW regions.
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This all seems really confusing. It almost seems like it would be better to have SG decide who can and can't enter automatically. Have the option when creating a giveaway for a key or steam gift. If you choose "steam gift", there is no region options to choose. In everyone's SG profile there is an option to choose your currency where you live (or SG can set it automatically based on your IP address so people can't screw things up).
Then when you create a "steam gift" giveaway, SG will do the calculations and automatically set the restrictions to only allow people to enter the giveaway if they will be able to accept the gift based on Steam's new rules.
Edit: Also, what happens if you create a giveaway for a certain game and that game goes on sale only in your region or the winners region before the giveaway ends and now since the price changed the game cannot be gifted even though it would of been possible when the giveaway was originally created.
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Steam doesn't support partial discounts, as far as I know.
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your currency where you live (or SG can set it automatically based on your IP address so people can't screw things up).
It doesn't matter where you live, it matters what your account store region is. For example, my SteamGifts country is Germany, but I haven't used the German store on this account in the time these store regions have existed.
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I guess we need a list of currencies with multiple selection.
Manually check the game on steam db, select everything is not locked
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Another suggestion, how about allowing multiple choices? That way, giveaways can be created both for RU+CIS and individual regions. The only issue is that the responsibility to not fuck up is in the giveaway creator's hands.
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I and others have been begging for multi-select region overhaul for a while, but it seems to be too far beyond the capabilities of the site, so I didn't want to complicate the suggestion this much. Right now, let's achieve something that actually works.
But yes, it would be nice. Considering that based on my past few thousand giveaways, an EUR+USD+CAD lock could mean i can pretty much skip checking for rule-breakers…
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We should have a complete list of countries with the option to include or exclude as needed. Locking down the whole site rules out the option to gift where prices fall within the 10% margin.
Here in Australia we pay in USD and often share the same price with the US for cheaper/indie games but not always. It will be the more expensive/AAA games that have the most problems.
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Hence currency. This new gifting only calculates what the other needs to pay, so it is currency regions, not actual countries. Many countries use the US dollar prices. Although I never really got why Kiwis got their own and Oz did not.
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Steam can have prices on currency, territory and country level. USD price in Australia can be different than in in US.
Valve has on-going lawsuit against it in Australia, that's why. (Technically speaking AUD is ready to go live)
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Different options for keys would allow for the current variables with those. At least until Valve screws that over as well.
And as madjoki said. USD prices are not the same in all countries that pay in USD.
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Actually it'd be even better if instead of having that option when creating a giveaway we had it in the account settings where we can set ours and it automatically uses that when creating/entering a gift GA.
And eventually maybe integrate something like what Enhanced Steam does and automatically checks regional pricing with the site allowing/prohibiting you to enter based on whether you're eligible to get it.
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The whole new Steam system is intransparent af, right of now there'd be need to implement both options as there are games which still CAN be gifted, as other people stated, so you'll still be able to create giveaways for them effectively without unnecessarily excluding people which would be eligible... a system so complicated support will definitely be spammed with so many tickets, that the user specific ones will most likely pale in comparison regarding numbers ;D. And then there's the issue with region locks on top of that...
Let's just hope that Valve will revise their current system and that, even if they don't pull back on it, they at least come up with a better solution than this. Hope dies last, eh :x.
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Wouldn't hope for it. System is transparent when you're the person it was created for - someone who buys gifts for family and friends.
It also makes lifes of people on SteamTrades or G2A harder, which is another plus in eyes of Valve.
And SG is too small minority to really be considered by Valve, at all - not even 100k people are over level 2 here, so there's really not that many of us, especially when you consider they right now totally deleted all "I bought gift, but it's region locked etc." emails they would receive.
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Smart suggestion. Also said the same thing. There are even some games that have really big price differences between ROW regions, so it affects more games and regions than you can imagine. xD
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Steam changed its gifting system considerably
As far as I'm aware, keys have not been changed, and they're not only still going to be a staple of the site, but they're likely to only increase their usage now that gifts have become such an unreliable hassle to give away. What you're asking for, merits or lack of merits aside, may still not be feasible regardless, given cg's past avoidance of implementing confusing restriction elements.
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Well keys have changed too, most cheap EU keys are now locked to EU for almost a year or so, and yet it is unavailable as a choice. Unless you limit to Germany only, which excludes most of EU.
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given cg's past avoidance of implementing confusing restriction elements.
https://www.steamgifts.com/discussion/vx2nh/could-we-please-get-an-eu-region-and-possibly-na-as-well#dCLe49l
https://www.steamgifts.com/discussion/vx2nh/could-we-please-get-an-eu-region-and-possibly-na-as-well/search?page=2#6ZIjzgE
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This affects Steam gifts though, and the large, large, large majority of region-locked giveaways are those. We just don't know how many are those, because it is the only generic giveaway stat that the site does not tell us.
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Right, but that's because the site itself doesn't put any real effort into distinguishing between keys and gifts. As I said, it's not a matter of merit, but of feasibility. I can't see cg implementing that change as-is, and any other implementation would require a significant reconsideration of the gifting system on the whole.
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Consider this thread a call-out to cg to finally say something about the matter. The change is live for a little while but so far not even an "okay, then we need to figure something out" has been said.
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Last month, 93.5% of gifts received on our site included a key. Another percentage of those would have received a key in private over e-mail or Steam chat, so we're looking at less than 5% of giveaways being for Steam gifts. We'll need to make a few changes to support, to better accommodate issues with those gifts (we're not going to force users that bought a game on sale, to buy a new copy at full value simply because they had bad luck and needed to request a new winner), and we'll obviously need to rethink the region system, which is why I'm following related discussions to see what ideas people have in mind.
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Hey, it worked, finally. :)
Plus now we have some ideas on key to gift ratio—and, I assume, a number that is close to the region-locked ratio?
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Can I suggest to changing the rules of accepting the gift to be in line with the 5 days the gift is active before being refunded. That will avoid the two day run ivers that will occur.
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Could you share some data how many % of the giveaways were region locked?
Even more interesting would be to know how many of the locked GAs, did end up so because it was indeed necessary. But I assume you won't be able to tell us that. :)
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10.2% of giveaways last month had a region restriction assigned to them.
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technically of that 93.5% of the keys delivered maybe a tiny (like maybe half a percent) bit less then that after you take out the few people that put "Gift_Sent_to_Email" inside the key field. or like myself, i dropped the gift email url inside the key field instead.
but yeah it's still somewhere around only 5% i'd say.
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I'm still trying to be hopeful they revert the change back, however this still would be excellent even if they did so ++++1 xD
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I'll go as far as to say, that there is no chance of them reverting it back.
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i've had others tell me they'd go as far as to say "there's no chance it will stay like this" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
i'd go as far as to say, hell if i know! ^^
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Considering that the Publishers will most likely agree on this change and Valve showing that they are willing to prevent any cross region trading, I'll say it won't happen.
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oh, specifically the regional stuff i doubt they revert too. i meant the gift storing inventory part i'm still hopeful on personally and has a small chance at returning.
i should of thought more on topic regional-wise but didn't.. xD
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I highly doubt storing the game in your Inventory would solve anything as you would still not be able to GA or trade it with people outside of your region. It of course gives you the freedom of acquiring it now and trading/giving it away whenever you feel like, but I don't think that's the main problem people have with this change.
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i'm USD personally so only higher priced steam store AAA games from me (US) to EU should in theory have an issue with region restrictions. so i have a harder time then most thinking about regional restrictions even still. basically i'd still be mostly row, so my main issue is actually the storing issue.
sorry though, i wasn't trying to stray this topic away from the regional issue, i just have a hard time thinking outside the box properly. lol
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I'm USD also. I can understand Valve not wanting cheaper regions to be able to gift to higher regions, but USD, EUR, & GBP should be able to gift to almost everyone in the world.
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Idk why, but i feel this lately change is more racist toward between countries.
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Seclusionism or isolationism are the words you were looking for. This would mean currency regions would create their own little playgrounds where others are seldom invited.
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racist
prejudice(d)
seclusionism or isolationism
Racism is prejudice against individuals due to racial, ethnic, or cultural considerations. Its usage doesn't make it suitable for the topic due to the topic not making any considerations toward the individuals within any country, as well as the lack of any clear show of prejudice. Prejudice is a preconceived bias which is not based within any sort of realistic foundation, and also isn't suitable for use in the context.
Isolationism is a governmental policy in which a government chooses on its own to separate itself from outside entanglements.
Seclusionism isn't really a commonly used term- and when used, it's generally synonymous with isolationism. As a separate term, it appears to be used to denote a stricter application of isolationism: A policy in which, in addition to isolationism's non-intervention considerations, the nation also actively avoids immigration and other outside culture importation.
Nationalism (the belief in the superiority of a singular nation or concept of nation at the expense of diminishing alternative concepts and those who fall under the scope of such concepts) and Xenophobia (prejudice toward outsiders) are generally the two terms most associated with antagonistic considerations toward an outside nation, but the more general term of "discrimination" (an unfair distinction between different entities) is presumably the word which would best apply here.
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I think a change is required for sure, but I think whatever it is it'll need to be basically automatic. I really can't imagine most of the members of this site understanding the new gifting rules or being able to figure out the currencies/regions reliably... We've already seen with the old "simple" regional locks how often there were incorrectly labeled giveaways. Also, people don't read when entering giveaways, so warnings or disclaimers there are useless. It just needs to be dead simple.
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User currency regions are known to the site; additionally, it seems like it is actually a nice one and cannot be faked easily. it can be automated therefore, yes. Heck, with a proper SteamDB integration, it could be automated in a way that all eligible currency regions could see any individual game's giveaways. I just sincerely doubt that if the site still cannot implement such a simple thing as automaticly rerolling anyone who has been suspended in the past 30 days with a certain infraction category (which are saved onto the profile), then a complex thing as database queries and difference calculations are light years beyond what we may realistically expect.
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I don't disagree with you there, although I tend to view it as "won't" rather than "can't" as far as willingness to implement some of these features...
I guess an additional complication is the uncertainty of when the gift will be sent. Prices and promotions can change during the giveaway and during the 7-day window. We almost need winner drawn on-demand rather than on a schedule...
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Steamdb is useless in terms of an automatic system for countries who pay in USD but have different pricing to the US.
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+1
Seems like support is waiting to see if Valve is going on with this bullshit... And it would be nice if the person could choose which regions, because of HB and others stores like you said.
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It could be even a dynamic thing: if you select gift, it switches to currency, if you select key, it uses the old regions.
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That's exactly what I was about to propose. It could even automatically select which currency regions you can gift it to and if your gift happens to be ROW, you can manually change it.
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Are we absolutely sure that keys & Gift links use the old regions?
SteamDB has GoNNER listed as no crossregion trading whatsoever.
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Keys activated appIDs, or more precisely certain packages with certain IDs. The packages still use the old system, unless developers now provide one build for every country. I am sure Valve would love to store ten times as many data just for that.
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Wouldn't one build for every country be easier? You can use specific string tables based on the windows locale code win_1250
(can't remember exact numbers)
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Do you know how much it would cost a developer to compile an entire game three dozen times for every single patch? Not to mention to upload it. Think of games like Doom 4, which is nearly 60 GB. Just compiling would take over a week, uploading an entire work day or more.
Developers are already grumbling when they have to provide a new build for GOG for every patch, since thy have to compile a Steam and a DRM-free version. Some are already taking the short route on Humble and their "DRM-free" copy is actually the exact same as the Steam one, only they provide a steamapi DLL that circumvents the requirement to have a client running.
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Apparently we're misunderstanding each other or something.
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only they provide a steamapi DLL that circumvents the requirement to have a client running.
Something like a no-Steam crack ;>
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Essentially, yes. I suspected for a time that these can be used this way, officially, but Humble packs confirmed that they are actually used as such.
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They aren't currency dependent. They are now price-dependent. I can gift Fallout 4 to someone in the US since they have it for 15% cheaper, but I cannot gift them Limbo which is 40% cheaper here. This also gets modified by sales/discounts. Your suggestion is unfeasible because it would require price-modelling every game on Steam including all the poop ones and then modifying it with sales which is complicated further by regional sales (for e.g. Sleeping dogs is on sale in NA/EU only right now). There is no correlation with currency at all.
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I think they are both Currency and Price dependent now. As there are still the previously existing regions but now even the prices across the countries in that region matter.
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Yeah, that's actually correct, I forgot about that. A lot of games have separate appID for different regions & some have runonlyincountry locks on top of purchaseonly locks, which is even more of a confuzzling poop-fest. Either way a currency lock won't help, you would need to check all the different purchase/run locks + appID + price difference and do a differential analysis on a game-by-game basis between the gifter & the winner to figure out whether the game can actually be activated by them or not.
Also, currency fluctuations matter, so if you start the giveaway today at 1 USD = 100 Poopers running for 2 days or the winner takes a long time to accept, and the GA ends with 1 USD = 150 Poopers, most likely the game that they could activate at the previous exchange rate cannot be activated now.
Thanks Gabe
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That exactly is the only way, I can think of, of solving it. Check Purchase locks and then Prices in countries within that Purchase lock.
I doubt that any currency would fluctuate anywhere above 10% in a couple of days (British Pound did and it took a Brexit to be achieved :D), so that's not the problem.
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So, if you would lock your copy down to US dollar, how would this not find a suitable winner?
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It would unless there is a region which uses USD and has lower prices than the other one.
EDIT: Australia comes to mind (if they still USD, which I think they do).
EDIT2: Many CIS countries use Steam in USD, yet they have prices way lower than any other USD using Store. Same goes for some South American countries.
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As far as I can see the new "gifting" system Valve implemented made gifting Steamgifts pretty much impossible on this site. It just raises so many problems and eventualities that it seems far too complicated to find an easy solution or any solution at all.
I'd suggest: disable gifting Steamgifts entirely. As weird as it may sound on a site called Steamgifts. We got to face the simple and sad truth now.
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Hoo boy, the shitfest that would follow. Only ROW people would remain then (well, mostly).
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Not really, as the 10% difference works both ways (so I've heard). You can't gift neither to a place that sells games cheaper nor to someplace with more expensive prices than 10% difference from your own price point. So you're pretty much limited to gifting within your own region, and this sucks so badly, I can't even...
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That is not entirely true, if at all. I think it's just missinformation due to variables with some games. Tristar was able to gift to a 25% lower area.
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It's not misinformation, it's simply what talgaby told me from his tests. Tristar told me about his -25% thing as well.
At this point we're all in the dark on what the real variables are and can only test things out.
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What I mean is that those who do region-locked giveaways only rely on Steam gifts. And many who do region-locked ones depend on them greatly. You can see users over level 7 with 90% or even higher region-locked percentages.
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+1. System needs a complete overhaul. We need to be able to add each country manually because each publisher sets different prices and because of that the number of countries I can gift change for each game.
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The easiest system would be, let make gifts on steamgifts country based. so if the one making the ga is us only us people can enter.
would exclude maybe a few people who could still get it, but is way with lowest amount of problems.
People without country setup in the profile, cant make gift giveaways.
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I don't know about all other currencies, but giving only one region to Europe is just wrong. Within Eurozone there are very different countries. I think it's wrong paying a game the same amount in, say, Germany and Greece. There should be at least two different zones: Germany/Austria/BeNeLux/Finland/Ireland/France, Italy/Spain/Portugal/Greece/all others. Just because we have the same currency doesn't mean we all earn the same. 60€ (for a new game, for example) in Germany are much less than 60€ in Italy. I personally would use a price for each country, but since we have Euro it could be confusing.
Best thing would be dismantling Euro and return to national currencies and set prices according to that, but if Valve wants to change things now (before Eurozone break-up), I would recommend one price for each nation (depending on gdp, exchange rate, taxes etc.) and being able to freely gift the games to similar or "poorer" regions (with equal or lower gdp pro capite).
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There used to be an EU2 pricing zone that had different prices as the Western European countries. Then Valve removed it.
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Yes, I know. Probably because of something like the free circulation of people and wares and capitals among the countries of the EU, or in name of price 'harmonization' (e.g. fuck off weaker countries, if you are poor it's your fault).
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Needs PLN as well. We have German prices, but our average income is a quarter of what Germany has...
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there is already Polish region on SG, and this topic is about introducing more region options to SG, not about introducing PLN currency to Steam. SG has nothing to do with Steam currencies.
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Ah, I misread. I skimmed the post late at night. You're right, he's talking about SG, not Steam.
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There is one side-effect to your proposal. Given the bad sentiment towards region-locked GA creators, I expect ROW keys would start to be locked to USD+EUR region combo.
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not like it isn't happening already. A lot of ppl make ROW GAs and mark them for their own region already - every time there is a new bundle even with ROW keys I see ppl making PL locked GAs for example, simply because they think it's cool that their own country have better chances. So idk if it would change much beside giving everyone the same tools that atm only some ppl have.
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Ohh, not much would change. The bright side is you won't ever run out of points ;
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Yes, that is the added effect. At least support would have less work.
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While the amounts have dropped, three quarters of all the people I had to reroll or found them to have red lines on an SGTools check from the past 12 months still do come from the same 5-7 countries. None of them part of the ROW Steam region.
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Ah, you will have less work. Support still would be getting reroll tickets since red-line users won't magically disappear )
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Err, if more and more people lock giveaways to ROW countries, then the chance for them to win will drop significantly (considering they won't be able to enter in the first place). Granted, this would segregate the site even more. Okay: a lot more.
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This is true only under assumption that non-ROW countries are "takers". Even then, with Russia making up 15% of userbase, they can roll on their own for quite a while.
On the other hand, countries like Australia, New Zealand (small representation on SG in absolute numbers+their own region due to pricinng or currency) will feel it first. Let's face it, most won't go through the whole list to add every "good" country each time. Instead would use US+EU combo at best.
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"A Russian cannot create a RU-CIS giveaway, because if a not Russian wins it, they cannot accept the gift. It affects every other country in that region. And there are quite a few of them. (At least until they are not invaded and annexed as well, but at the current rate, it may take a decade or so.)"
You just HAD to mix politics into this.
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Acctually, different games have different price difference between different currencies. So the best mathod is:
- Scan all the prices of all the games in every currency region.
- When somebody creats a 'new' gift which is bought by a certain currency, the system scans all prices of the game, and locked the currency regions whose prices is higher than 110% sellected currency region. And open to all other regions.
According to this system, the gifters do not need to know which region can enter the SG. They only sellect the currency they would buy the gift.
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Wrong. Even if price is close, there can be additional restrictions (purchaserestrictedcountries), which was very common until Valve made default region locks. Still some games use it, though.
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CIS dollar region (a region that counts in US dollars but actually has a much lower base price, just not nearly as low as the Russian one)
Not even nearly. Prices in Rouble minimal twice cheaper compare to CIS US dollar region. Minimal.
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As pretty much most/all of us heard by now, Steam changed its gifting system considerably.
This now means that the region implementation used on this site have become useless beyond the occasional Humble and Bundle Stars keys, which retain those regions.
This pretty much means that instead of the geographical regions, we now have currency "regions", and the site should probably reflect that, considering the following funny situations:
A Russian cannot create a RU-CIS giveaway, because if a not Russian wins it, they cannot accept the gift. It affects every other country in that region. And there are quite a few of them. (At least until they are not invaded and annexed as well, but at the current rate, it may take a decade or so.)
A Brazilian cannot create a South American giveaway as almost every other country in that region uses US prices or just simply higher ones. Because reasons. And while it is undoubtful that Brazil is a large country, but the rest of Latin America is still larger.
A Malaysian or an Indonesian cannot create a SEA giveaway, because the same reason. Yes, I know, SEA is probably the least populated "large" region in terms of SteamGifts userbase, but still.
The current system therefore needs an overhaul, or more like a replacement, where instead of territories, we now need currencies for Steam gifts. The currently supported ones on Steam should be these:
Addendum: for clarification: a multi-select system would work the best, since gifting is a strange one-way system now: if the game is more expensive in the gifter's region, it can be sent to any cheaper region, so only cheaper regions are seriously locked down. This most often means Russia, but there are games where India, a random SEA country, Turkey, Mexico, or maybe even some totally other one gets the best deals.
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