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[Catastrophic lolcats]

So news has broken via the folks at Steamdb that Steam is giving publishers the right to allow their games to be gifted across regions or not. It was discovered shifting through the recent Metal gear Rising: Revengeance data when a very strange tag was found (This was apparently first used in Sonar X3 software a few hours before however).

The strange tag:
Name   Steam Sub 36077
Name (Store)   METAL GEAR RISING: REVENGEANCE
...
AllowCrossRegionTradingAndGifting   No

Most of the information seems to be coming out of a NeoGaf thread.
Current information indicated that this is currently only affecting South America and Eastern Europe (Slavic) countries. While this is most likely an attempt to stop gray market trading and curve unofficial key resale it does present dire consequences for countries that are suffering from price gouging, censorship and forced/terrible regionalisations/translations. 
VPNs are being recorded as being able to get around this current restriction but VPNs have already been demonised by Valve and are in no way a solution.

I'm sure there are members of the community (myself included) from places such as Australia, Germany, New Zealand, Russia and Brasil that have to import games or trade with international friends to get around the previously mentioned problems. Other problems about these restrictions could include not being able to buy games when travelling overseas or just not being able to buy a friend who lives overseas a game.
If restrictions are really expanded it could even force customers to have to use regional only retailers and such things as buying games internationally on Greenman Gaming or Amazon could become a thing of the past.

I hope to see some discussion on this topic and also be the first to say a big "fuck you" to PlatinumGames/Konami.

[Sonlirain]

Well guess i lucked out since Poland should be counted as europe and any eventual BS that may come out of this won't affect me.

It's strange seeing steam do this tho. I'd sooner expect EA do somethig like that... well they probably did already... so yeah.

[Puzzlemaker]

It's probably for legal reasons, annoyingly enough.   

[10ebbor10]

Truly, they're probably only doing this because it was requested by developers.

Though IIRC, they have done it before (and retroactively) with the orange box.

[Neyvn]

UGH... Back to paying an extra 20USD for some games then huh...

[Frumple]

Or not.

Just... don't buy games that are ripping folks off. Stick to companies that don't practice the behavior. S'probably the only way any change has even the possibility of coming about, short of consumer protection laws coming in and locking down on it.

[LeoLeonardoIII]

I don't understand. If you're Australian for example and you have to pay more for games locally, just make a Steam account and give information that says you're in the US. I'm probably missing something.

[Mictlantecuhtli]

Boooooooo.

[aristabulus]

I don't understand. If you're Australian for example and you have to pay more for games locally, just make a Steam account and give information that says you're in the US. I'm probably missing something.

You'd have to jump through a lot of hoops to make that work, including but not limited to having a rock solid proxy and US payment vectors.  It's likely less hassle to just pay the Aussie prices.

[10ebbor10]

Honestly, I don't understand why Australians have to pay that much. I mean, it's usually more than in Europe, and we have additional taxes and currency conversion working against us.

[LeoLeonardoIII]

I don't understand. If you're Australian for example and you have to pay more for games locally, just make a Steam account and give information that says you're in the US. I'm probably missing something.

You'd have to jump through a lot of hoops to make that work, including but not limited to having a rock solid proxy and US payment vectors.  It's likely less hassle to just pay the Aussie prices.

Like a Paypal account? Steam gets a payment from Paypal, doesn't care where the money comes from because the money is good, and you're golden.

Or would Steam track your connection and say, "Hey, this account is set up in the US but the guy keeps connecting from Australia, BAN"? That's just churlish.

Region-locking in general is despicable. Are they gonna try to sell me a pair of slippers that I'm only allowed to use in my bedroom but not in my kitchen? And they wonder why people hate them.

[aristabulus]

Like a Paypal account? Steam gets a payment from Paypal, doesn't care where the money comes from because the money is good, and you're golden.

Or would Steam track your connection and say, "Hey, this account is set up in the US but the guy keeps connecting from Australia, BAN"? That's just churlish.

Region-locking in general is despicable. Are they gonna try to sell me a pair of slippers that I'm only allowed to use in my bedroom but not in my kitchen? And they wonder why people hate them.

If you don't have the source code, you can't say for certain that monitoring does not occur on the various ways to get around the region locking.  _If_ they are, and _if_ they detect it, they can and will lock you out of everything you've ever bought. The boilerplate language is in the EULA somewhere, and even if it's not something that'll stand up in court... you'll still have to go to court to challenge it.  They win by attrition, because lawyers are expensive.

I agree that region locking is bullshit...  but don't think for an instant that circumvention of those locks are foolproof, or without possible consequence.

[Sappho]

They already discriminate regionally by price. Might as well fuck us over in other ways as well.

They determine your region by your IP. If you try to hide your IP, they check your payment method to make sure it's in the US. I've heard stories of people getting caught in Europe trying to cheat the system and pay the US price using an IP-changing program, getting in trouble because the bank account they had linked to PayPal was not in the US, and getting their entire Steam account locked and banned forever.

You can say it's for "legal reasons" but look at sites like Humble Bundle and GOG. They do just fine without any discrimination between regions. Valve are just a bunch of dicks, as far as I can see.

[Robsoie]

It reminds me of the same regional problems when steam decided their insane dick move 1 € = 1 $ , meaning that the price of any products their european region customers were buying became overpriced in comparison to the same product bought in an actual european physical store.

I remember at the time some protest groups being created against valve, some of their members becoming "oddly" banned from steam, etc...

[Sappho]

It reminds me of the same regional problems when steam decided their insane dick move 1 € = 1 $ , meaning that the price of any products their european region customers were buying became overpriced in comparison to the same product bought in an actual european physical store.

I remember at the time some protest groups being created against valve, some of their members becoming "oddly" banned from steam, etc...

As a European resident, I'm a member of one of those protest groups. Several of my posts to the forums have been censored, but so far I haven't gotten any further trouble. All I did was post asking what the supposed official reason was for making $1 = €1, and they deleted the thread within a few minutes. It's one thing to claim "the publishers set the prices, it's not our fault," but it's awfully hard to pretend you're not just fucking people over when you won't even let anyone ask the question.