So, hey maybe I'm being kinda naive, but get this: why instead of try to adapt EVERYTHING to this new wimp of his, we just fight it back? you know, like paying mods! FFS people grow a pair, IDK, obviously a few heads ain't gonna do nothin' but it worked before when people realized they could actually have a saying in this, and Valve had to shift to reverse.
If you don't like something, fight it, change it, the only thing permanent -so far- is death.
PS. Where's ARG peso? yes, we don't have our own "store", we have regionlocked games to south america (like stated above) BUT with USA -Murica- prices..
Some say that maybe if we did had our own store and in Argentinian pesos, it may just backfire; as in we'd be screwed just as our socio-economic situation is now!
Just my 2 cents..
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Fight it how? Paid mods were pushed back because even the press went eventually against it, as paid mods were going against what mods stood for in the past 20 years or so. (Although initially paid mods were a thing, id even released a bunch of Doom community mods commercially.)
But this… this only removes a feature Valve itself added back then and replaced it with a gifting system that is, to be frank, quite normal—just a helluva lot more restrictive than the one they had thus far.
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Well, like with everything else when many people don't like or are against it.. For example, with the paying mods, they implemented BADLY; it would had been ok if it were a button to "donate" since that's pretty much the way it is tho not mandatory and it's ALL for the modders. In this case, besides the poor implementation they wanted a slice of the pie..
Back to topic, they are entitled to do what they want with their company/platform, BUT people don't have to take something if they don't like it, meaning if people decided to simply don't buy and make noise about this, it will end up in the press just like before.
It's funny how this sort of thing works in the US and Europe, while in here people just don't give a rat's arse and they keep on throwing their money -as it's their right, granted- but then we don't get to complain, do we?
Say phone bills (or something else) are increased 300%, people would stop and make themselves heard, companies then turn back on their actions and it's a win for the community. This don't usually happen in Argentina but it could happen IF people WANTS it hard enough... that's my point.
How? with firm decisions, with control over your wallets, with a spine and strong believes about what you want and how you want it, that's how!
If you see me gone, then you know what happened.
Regards
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It's only the theory, sadly. Valve or any corporation backing up from anything happens only when it really grows big enough to hurt them. So far this new system apparently didn't even generate a small wave in the media.
As for the phone analogy, it is an interesting one. Did you know that text messages (SMS) are actually and literally free for the providers? They are carried alongside the system signalling message, yet not only in some countries they cost more than a minute of speech, but in others both the sender and the receiver pays for them. Yet nothing has been done about it for decades.
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Thanks talgaby I actually didn't knew about that, and you're correct both sender and receiver are charged, despite one of them having plan with benefits.. yeah right. So, most likely it's been like that for decades and nobody does a thing because only a handful know that. Cruel world huh? monkeys dancing around the money.
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there's a big priblem with your reasoning. Most of Steam users don't buy gifts for other people at all. Heck - avg Steam user game count is 11 games, people who were buying gifts were either in vast majority traders selling/trading these gifts to ppl in more expensive regions or in very very small minority people who were buying these gifts to gift them to people. Look at SG - we have 1 million users, that's in itself less than 0.5% of Steam userbase. We only have maybe 20k contributors, most of which are just giving bundle leftovers, so people who were buying gifts on SG for GAs are maybe 10k, it's 0.004% of Steam userbase. We're not important at all, we are just a casuality in Valve fight with ppl buying gifts to sell/trade them, noone will care about such a small minority.
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Hmm interesting, statics show we're just a drop in the ocean, but still, even a single drop can cause waves... Wishful thinking, I know..
This affects those who used -or were thinking of using- traders to adquire games which couldn't possibly afford in our own store, not to mention the lack of decent offers and crappy coupons, etc, etc. Now, if I didn't buy before this, when at least I had the chance to do it now with is is next to impossible. So, lets see numbers: if before this one could buy 1-5 games in say 6 months, now that's maybe 1 game, same price. The discussion would be then, if by this new policies get Valve more money by forcing customers to either buy fullprice in their region, or don't buy at all. Time will tell I guess, after all people can always surprise us, right?
Oh, and remember the steam keys issue which isn't implemented but isn't "forgotten" either.. IMO that's the line, THAT would be the end!
Monopoly is bad, specially for us the community. Competition however, keeps things in perspective. If Valve drops the ball, it may be time for other team fills the void.
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yes it does affect traders - but traders - especially the ones mass trading games from cheaper regions to more expensive ones, be it via G2A or just trading platforms like SteamTrades (from Valve's perspective there's not really any difference) - are exactly the people Valve tried to target. And people who use their (traders) services. And they did hit them hard, we are just minor casualty - too small for Valve to give two shits about us, they not gonna change things to make it fair for minority like us, while it would mean making it available again for majority they wanted to hit in the first place (traders).
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Makes sense, yes.
Now, the reason traders existed was (to my eyes) 2 main reasons: 1. impossibility of getting something 2. getting it cheaper.
If Gaben decided to do FAIR prices for everyone, (and not just some of them like until now) then there's no reason for the traders to exist, therefore no more reason to look how to fool/bypass the system in order to get games cheaper.
Remember bundle sites and traders were actually the reason many people got into legit playing instead of keep pirating.
Don't they know that or just don't care? Pirating hurts both Valve and developers, publishers, the whole package.
IDK, Somebody could quote the man himself when he said something about Valve providing something so gamers would rather go legit than keep pirating. Now seems he forgot about that, huh?
Shady sites like g2a were created and grew because of this huge gray area Valve isn't covering. Ofc pricing has to do with devs/publishers rather than Valve itself, sigh, everything is more complicated than what it should be :P
It would be far better to make things easier for us rather than go to the hassle of looking another way, it's just plain stupid.
I'm not advocating piracy, lets get that clear!
Alright, feel free to correct me if I'm mistaken.
Good talk zelghadis :)
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Reason 1 was minority as well. Only Germany, Australia and Japan had any serious censorhip problems, and they were minority as well. Same as we are. So real reason was reason two. As for reason two, it was never even close to being fair, from one point of perspective, I live in EU, yet I live in one of the poorest EU countries, I earn 1/5th of what german, british or french ppl does, yet I gotta pay the same amopunt of money for Steam games, on the other hand if you live in region which has lots of monies, you'd want to buy in cheap region anyway. because what does it matter if you gotta work 2 hours to buy newest game and someone else gotta work 10 hours? if this someone else has game twice cheaper it would mean you would have to work just 1 hour, so it'sd a good deal and you'll have it. That's the reason we're in current situation, because devs decided to lower prices in some regions because ppl there earn times less, but ppl who earn a lot wanted to have even cheaper games. German person earns 60EUR (AAA price) in 4 hours, Romanian person gotta work for it for half a week, so devs decide to lower price, but German person want game cheaper, so trades for it instyead of buying in his region. Simple as that.
Shady sites like G2A grew because Valve is shitty at doing their job. Because not only german person earning 30EUr/hr had to paid 60EUR for brand new AAA title, but also polish/slovak/romanian person earning 3EUR per hour instead of 30 had to poaid same 60EUR for the game. And when some publishers decided that maybe they should pay 20EUR Germans wanted to pay 20EUR as well so they traded for it. And to make these trades easier there came shady sites like G2A and Kinguin etc. In the first place it's Steam and publishers who are to be put to balme, but still - can you blame someone just wanting to buy their games twice cheaper?
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Because not only german person earning 30EUr/hr <
pls, thats not even anywhere realistic
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That was hypothethical example purposefully made extreme (still realistic amount of money unlike you state earned by engineer or IT specialist for example), but ok if you cannot live with that think about german person making 12EUR/h and thus being able to afford 1.6 brand new AAA title or in other words game being equal 5h of their worktime, while at the same price polish peraon earning 3EUR/h gotta work 20h aka 2.5 day to afford the same title.
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you cannot take the one of the highest earnings for one country and one fo the lowest for another and compare them together. especially not if you let out stuff like way expensiver rental fee / insurances / and so on.
thats not only unrealistic, its useless either.
Little example rental fee alone here in austria is already at 500-800€ (its going up and even 1000 arent that unrealistic nowadays anymore)
A few years before German rental fees where higher then in Austria. so if theirs did go up like ours you can take that for them too.
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like i said hypothethical example purposefully made extreme. What is so hard to understand here? Also "more expensive" not "expensiver" ;)
Did I mention rental or anything like that anywahere? No. Because it's obvious that in country where avg wage is lower rent will be lower as well. I simply compared product prices, prices for the same product (or not the same in case of german censorship ;p) and compared them with buying power. What does the cost of living has to do with this? It does not affect the thing I was talking about in the slightest.
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And as i said the whole example given from you is useless without this information. buying power depends on living needed costs. unless you want to tell me someone buys games first before he even have a home / food / and so on.
Otherwise i could go take the earnings from some polish millionaire and the the lowest earning form at / de and whine about how cheap your games are while we pay so much ;)
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I already gave you other example as you couldn't comprehend first one, still you decide to ignore it. not adress it at any point, just keep whining about first one I already changed, explained over two times, you don't give a damn bout what I write so any discussion with you at this point is pointless.
And unless you spend 100% of what you earned on home/food and other expenses whatever is left can be calculated as how many hours you gotta work to buy something. You can work 20% of time for your expenses, you can work 75% of the time for your expenses, it doesn't change the fact that when you're done for the rest of the time you will be earning game per X hours and someone else per Y hours, which is thus perfectly relative comparison method. But hey, don't bother answering, because I'm sure your next comment will still consist of nothing else but picking on something that gopt commented and explained multiple times, but what does it matter to you if you can just use it over to over in a discussion ;p
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SG could store the game's prices from all regions and only allow people who are within the allowed price difference to join a giveaway when gift is selected.
It would prevent most gifting issues related to price differences, but would probably be a pain for cg to implement.
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not really, currency values fluctuate all the time, and GA entry which is valid today may no longer be valid tommorow. Like atm 1USD = 1.09EUR, so it's ok for US user to enter EU user GA. But in 1 week b4 GA ends EUR may be worth 1.12USD, over 10$ and EU gift will no longer be redeemable in US because of 10% rule.
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That would still minimize the amount of invalid people who would be able to join in. Other option would be to allow same region and regions with lower prices.
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Did the system change?
According to my testing just now the inane 10% limit seems gone:
I was not stopped by an error message at payment trying to gift a game into a country at 60% price increase (both being ROW regions).
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So, the 10% is gone ? (your region was 60% cheaper o 60% more expensive ?)
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Appears to me, am asking for others to confirm.
Test was from 60% cheaper game price region into 60% more expensive. Another with 30% difference.
(Opposite way, into cheaper region, was never blocked before.)
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seems like it's still there.
wanted to gift a game from eu1 (4,99€) to na ($7,99) and it didn't worked...
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For gifts, the region restriction should be set by currency.
For keys with regional restrictions, the old region system works (mostly).
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I wanted to give away a game I liked during the summer sale, but I cannot gift to people in other countries in my region due to the price difference.
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I was somewhat against the currency idea to begin with. But it seems most games are the same USD value in USA and Australia. So it works for me (though it may be screwed over quite soon with taxes). I still think we should have the option to also include or exclude each individual country as necessary when required as there will always be games with locks outside of the norm.
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We pay quite a bit more for some and we will be paying 10% more from next month.
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All I'm asking is to move Poland out of Germany region. Germans make 4x more money than we do, and yet we have the same prices. Almost every other store/retailer adjusts for that, and we have lower prices, only Steam and Humble stubbornly bundle us with Germany.
Goddamn hell, we have our own Eastern/Central Europe region lock (couldn't buy damn Dishonored DLC because it was incompatible with Dishonored RHCP*!), but we get Western Europe prices!
* Russia, Hungary, Czech Republic and Poland region, or, as I like to call it, Red Hot Chili Peppers region
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Today I tried to gift a game to my friend who has a russian store( I have US)... and guess what, I couldn't! Cuz of regional differences even though prices in my store are higher than his. This is ridiculous
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Oh, the repository locks are still in place, underlying the new currency-based gifting lock. It is now a dual-layer system, despite what they originally said that the recipient will always be able to get the game. But Valve lying is not exactly anything surprising.
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How does Australia fit into this? We have to pay in US dollars but are subject to Australian censorship and ratings. For instance, I cannot see the Steam Store page for Risen, but I can see Risen 2 and Risen 3. I am guessing that Risen was refused classification before Australia adopted a R18+ rating classification in 2013 and has not been reassessed since then.
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With Humblebundle games being restricted to gifting in only certain countries, having a selectable country list for GA creation is now more important than ever.
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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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