To Fight Currency Mismatches, Steam Adding Region Locking to PC Games

will_die writes Because of recent currency devaluation Steam has now added region locking for games sold in Russia and CIS. Brazil and local area and Indonesia and local area are also being locked. If you purchase a game from one of those regions you cannot gift it to somone outside of the area. So someone from Russia can gift a game to someone to Georgia [Note: This Georgia, rather than this one, that is.] but not to someone in the USA. You want to see the prices in the Russia store and compare them to the Steam Christmas Sale which should be starting in a few hours.

Comments

Re:Why Steam? Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Politically speaking, Russia's currency lost value because they invaded a nearby nation and they are under sanctions.

That was more like the catalyst. The real blow came from the ~50% decline in oil prices since the beginning of the year. The Russian economy is 40%+ oil and gas and their export economy is almost entirely based on exports of same. The decline in oil prices did far more damage than sanctions or political talk alone could ever hope to.

Re:Georgia and Georgia, silly use of hyperlinks

[kamapuaa]

It was pretty obvious what they meant even without looking at the hyperlinks.