Last year, Valve already made it harder to change your store country on Steam by requiring users to make a purchase from the country they claimed they were in with a payment method from said country. This made things difficult for people who use VPNs (virtual private networks that let you pretend you’re browsing the internet in another country), because they could no longer say, “Hey Steam! I’m in France!” before whacking in some UK bank details. For context, regional pricing on Steam is typically done so that games can be sold cheaper in lower-income countries. Users have tried to abuse this for ages - which I kinda understand, I can appreciate a good bargain hunt. However, this often means that publishers end up hiking prices for those lower-income regions, which sucks for the people who actually live there. Notably, this happened with Horizon Zero Dawn when it came to PC (it saw a 389% price increase in Argentina). Interestingly, earlier this year Valve and a number of game publishers were fined by the European Commission for geo-blocking Steam keys in certain EU countries. While Valve might’ve meant well trying to keep prices low in certain areas, technically that’s a bit naughty in Europe. The European Union’s Digital Single Market rules require that everyone who lives in the EU should be able shop around and buy things from all other EU countries.
