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: