[UPDATE July 30th] PSA: Cross currency/country Steam gifting is banned over VPNs

Gaming
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UPDATE: Only VPNs apply. And I’m using a VPN to dodge the CCP.

Apparently new rules came into effect in 2017 to stop grey market key resellers from “pirating” games. (so they moved on to pirating Windows)

The rule states that if the price between 2 Steam Stores is over 10% in both directions of negative and positive, gifting a game is banned across countries because the price difference is too high. EVEN IF you are paying MORE to gift someone a game in America for instance, gifting is banned.

This means cross border gifting between Canada and the US is banned during a Steam Sale. No exceptions. Steam states on their Gifting help page that Steam Support will not engage with help requests regarding gifting. Because games use a fixed percentage discount with the local currency and priced to market value of the local currency, the values are wildly above 10% difference.

Not so honest pirates use this to skirt pricing for resale, but honest Canadians and Americans doing cross border gifting are screwed because those sites did do that, and now, people will have to hope the sale is OVER before seeing if the base price is more than 10% difference. (and that’s if the dev played nice)

It’s like trying to get DRM working. You’re an honest consumer but you’re screwed the most.

This has been a very angry rant and PSA from Jack. There’s nothing that can be done because if they made exceptions all the time, then their anti-piracy strategy for key resellers has failed. It’s impossible to get this resolved using Steam due to automatic guilt being applied for anyone attempting this. And you can’t contact Steam Support about it.

Edit: Oh, and devs can arbitrarily set this restriction permanently for the length of the game’s lifetime (regardless of sale status or not) with the single boolean AllowCrossRegionTradingAndGifting… This is bullshit. SteamDB hides this under the package information:

https://steamdb.info/sub/247890/info/

I tried. I genuinely tried and this is all the thanks I get, a new form of developer incentivized geo-locking.

Edit: And now people just had to make it worse. It’s now outright banned over VPNs:

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Huh, Canada is more than 10% cheaper than USA for games?
I guess they live up to Canuckistan…

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SteamDB will not allow comparisons of base prices to other base prices during a sale, which is specifically handy to people to see if a sale ends that they can do this if the boolean for that bullshit is set to “yes”.

Edit: Oh the SteamDB devs want to start a shitstorm, huh? It’s a free service so don’t expect anything is the argument… Like I needed this after being so frustrated learning these rules after they were introduced 3 years ago… then only learning of it now when I’m trying to be generous.

Edit 2: Oh and they blocked back. Okay. Sons of bitches. You at SteamDB just violated so many codes of conduct.

Edit 3: Your trolling followers have followed, I see. Yeah, the whole SteamDB project is full of assholes.

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You can get around this by the recipient using a VPN and changing their country in Steam.

There is a two week cooldown before they can change again though.

IIRC PayPal can do currency conversion too.

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I tried PayPal, but the cooldown period meant they still thought I was in Canada, like how we used to try to set our age higher on our YouTube accounts when it was new only to be blocked by cooldown.

It seems to look at the PayPal account country preference. If it’s in Canada, no matter what shipping address you use, it won’t work.

And it’s EPOSVOX I’m asking to change their Steam account to Canada, not just a random friend. I can’t ask him to compromise his Steam account for 2 weeks…

Plus, for some titles it doesn’t matter if the price difference is within line, because the dev can set the boolean to “no”.

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Lol I wonder how this will affect me because I’ve had my country set to Antarctica for the least 6 years.

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You can’t gift games to people in any other country if the dev has set that bullshit boolean to “No.”

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Ah, that does suck. Guess we’ll have to wait until after the sale or just play a different game.

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No, you don’t get it… If the dev sets the boolean, it’s PERMANENTLY not allowed so you can’t wait for a Steam Sale to end. The percentages don’t apply if the boolean is set to “No.” It’s a flat out denial in that case.

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How new is this feature?

Oh, 2017.

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I was just as surprised as you as I finally found an opportunity to gift in YEARS and this bullshit is thrown in the mix.

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That has to be enabled by the devs though right?

TBH I don’t think it’s all doom and gloom because in the last 3 years I’ve gifted lots of games to people. So I guess not a lot of devs use it.

But it does suck if someone buys it for their friends and now they can’t gift. Kinda defeats the whole purpose of gifting.

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You can’t even buy it. The changes prevent the transaction from even completing.

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But if you bought ahead of time?

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Previous gifts are not affected before the change. Only after the change will you be prevented from making a transaction because the difference is too high, or the dev has decided “No” on that boolean.

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So is it better to use gifting in the Epic store, or the EA one, or Bethesda or any others?

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Probably best to just buy a Steam gift card and give that to your friend.

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So if I got a game on sale in US and wanted to give my friends in Canada a copy, this would fail just during the sale window or permanently? I’m curious how it would stop the transaction because you can just buy games to leave as gifts in your inventory.

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That ruins the element of surprise. It was supposed to be a surprise.

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Or a key on a legit reseller site? Like GOG or whatever?

I guess I would pay full price or whatever?