Slashdot Mirror
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.
You have a DRM system that is the least hated (and actually liked in some cases) by the users of any. (And the Linux support is appreciated by a LOT of folks, including me.) Doing this will only fan the flames of hate for a very small increase in revenue. Because people will move or travel, and all there games will stop working, and they will post it all over the net. And you will get zero sympathy for this crap.
Didn't the rouble lose like a million percent of its value against the dollar in a day or something? They don't want you to take advantage of that, but they also don't want to alienate the Russians by raising their prices to compensate for the currency crash. I guess the middle ground should be: if you buy from the US store you can use it everywhere. If you buy from the Russian store you're stuck in Russia until you purchase the worldwide upgrade.
Let's say the game costs 10 times less in Russia. You ask Russian friend to buy it for you but you send him twice the amount required. That means you both got the game for 1/5th of the U.S.A. price. The game creators and Steam lose.
Let's say Steam increases the price in Russia so that it matches the U.S. dollar value. Your Russian friend can no longer afford games. Your friend, the game creators and Steam lose.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
You have a DRM system that is the least hated (and actually liked in some cases) by the users of any. (And the Linux support is appreciated by a LOT of folks, including me.) Doing this will only fan the flames of hate for a very small increase in revenue. Because people will move or travel, and all there games will stop working, and they will post it all over the net. And you will get zero sympathy for this crap.
I don't see ANYTHING about games ceasing to work. This only prevents you from gifting a game (purchasing on another user's behalf).
You can still buy a game in one location and play it in another, you just can't gift it to someone else's account in another region.
I'm okay with that; despite what some people here will argue (free market blah blah) I'd sooner see purchase restrictions like this than expect people in poor countries to pay a week's wages for a game or movie or album.
As long as they don't start making content only available in certain regions, they're making the best of a bad situation.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Well, they were simply waiting for a pretext to start boiling the frog. There is no real competition to Steam in digital, they managed to completely kill off PC game retail, so now they will start implementing draconian measures. Region locks. Always-connected. Limited activations. In-game adds.
"Because people will move or travel, and all there games will stop working" -- This has nothing to do with the games not working, it's only about being able to buy games or gift games in those cheap areas. If you have bought the game it'll still continue to work, regardless of where you bought it or where you're playing it in.
Ugh...
Region locks are vile practice. It's infuriating to see them creeping into PC gaming (historically a region-free platform) at a time when two of the three console developers have ditched them and the third (Nintendo) is considering dropping them. That said, it's worth reflecting on why they exist. There are, historically, two reason behind this.
The first is plain old-fashioned cultural stereotyping (which somebody being less diplomatic might call "racism"). This is the classic Nintendo reason. Big paternalist companies like Nintendo (they're not alone in this, but are the worst offenders) have this weird outlook that says that they should function as some kind of moral arbiter of what should and should not be available in each territory. Hence certain games are "not a good cultural fit for some regions" (usually a view based on offensive broad-brush stereotypes... or racism, if you prefer the more honest term) or "require alterations to be culturally appropriate" (meaning "we're going to cut the game to hell on release in some territories, because REASONS"). Happily, this particular driver behind region locking is on the decline. Sony used to buy into it every bit as much as Nintendo, but have completely washed their hands of it. Even Nintendo are considering getting out of this game. I should add that a few territories (a handful of religious-wacko countries, plus Germany and Australia - what good company they find themselves in) set up their own barriers that require these kind of locks on occasion. In those cases, the blame rests with the Governments of those countries, not the platform owners/publishers.
The second reason is more complex and is down to differential pricing. Not every currency is of the same strength or stability. The last few days have made that pretty clear, if it wasn't already. And by and large, a lot of those countries which have weak and/or unstable currencies also tend to have very high piracy rates. A lot of companies (Microsoft used to be particularly bad in this respect, but have been stepping back lately) operate under the delusion that if they sell their products really really cheap in those territories, they can get people to buy legitimately, rather than pirating their products (all the evidence to date shows this doesn't work). Problem is, when you do that, you create a huge reverse-import problem; why would a US or European consumer pay the going rate in their territory for a locally-bought copy, when they could import a Brazillian or Russian or Vietnamese copy for a fraction of the price (which probably has English-language support anyway)?
Now, in a pure free market, one of two things would happen. Either the company selling the product would have to drop its price globally, or else it would have to accept that customers in those marginal economies just couldn't, for the most part, afford its products. But we live in a world where they're allowed to circumvent the free-market at will - via region locks. So first-world consumers get to subsidise producers (usually fruitless) speculation in developing-world markets.
There's a curious mirror image of this around one particular market; Japan. See, Japanese consumers are willing to pay massively over the odds for media (movies, games, TV series both live action and animated), particularly when said media is domestically produced. Seriously, you think UK or Australian consumers pay over the odds? It's nothing to what they'll pay in Japan. And because Japan has a large media industry which has grown accustomed to being able to milk this unquestioningly loyal (and seemingly happy to be exploited) domestic market, a good chunk of it is desperate to keep said market behind a walled garden, with reverse importing from the rest of the world locked off.
So yeah... region locking... a few reasons for it, none of them good for the consumer. Truly sad to see it come to Steam (though it's been creeping in at the margins for a while now). The only alternative? Fix all regions' price to the dollar (allowing for differences in local sales taxes, which is the major difference, for instance, between US and UK prices). But then a good chunk of the world wouldn't be able to afford to buy anything like as many games.
Didn't the rouble lose like a million percent of its value...but they also don't want to alienate the Russians by raising their prices to compensate for the currency crash
Economically speaking, this would mean that valve is selling games at 1 millionth of the usual price, but still profiting off them. Profiting so much, that they are willing to make custom software changes rather than just change the price. That's surprising math to me. Sometimes I wonder why companies, especially companies selling digital goods, don't just set the price in one particular currency then let it somewhat auto-fluctuate in the other currencies according to the market. Wouldn't that be simpler for them?
Politically speaking, Russia's currency lost value because they invaded a nearby nation and they are under sanctions. It is interesting that Valve is willing to go through effort to continue to offer them games at a price they can afford.
It's not about revenue, it's about shady resellers. Steam was cheerfully ignoring your Russian buddy gifting you games for ages until a few high profile cases of shady resellers selling bad keys. As has been pointed out in the rest of this thread you can still buy a game in Russia and play it in the US. You just can't gift them anymore. Steam is killing of the key resellers so that ppl knew to Steam and computers don't get ripped off by them.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
It's an anti-embargo. Russians can continue to afford their games despite drastic currency devaluation. Considering the other option is to raise Russian prices drastically, seems this is a gamer friendly decision.
No, a simple disc check is least hated. This is exactly the problem with Steam, they control all of your games and can deny access any time they want. GOG.com is the way to do game distribution correctly. No artificially required, resource using, spyware client and no DRM in the games.
And, none of those reasons are why region locking was added to Steam.
Further, it's not region locking like you described and railed against. All Steam did is wall off a handful of regions where the local currencies are extremely volatile, and even then ONLY for accounts gifting games to one another between the rest of the world and these tiny regions.
Your butthurt is misguided here. Let the strawman go.
GeekNights!
Late Night Radio for Geeks!
I can't check until tonight when I get home from work but are account regions locked? I know mine currently shows the US but when I travel to Japan next month, will it update?
The reason I ask is if VPN could get around this. For example, getting the NHL (ice hockey) package cost $150 in the US. My friend noticed that the cost through a European IP was only $100. He saved $50 just by masking his IP and there is no need to mask his IP when streaming the games live.
I am curious if something similar could get around the Steam issue.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
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.
Had this happened 5 years ago, it's likely ISIS wouldn't have happened, but sadly they can survive now without Iranian funding.
Oh, dear, you were doing so well with your amateur economics lesson, then you stray into international affairs and fuck up bad.
Iran has never funded, and could never conceivably fund, ISIS.
ISIS is a bunch of Sunni islamic loons. Iran is a bunch of Shia islamic loons. ISIS kill Shia more or less on sight.
Iran is an ally of ISIS's enemies, Iraq and Syria. Iran is currently bombing ISIS.
If ISIS received outside funding it came from the Gulf, possibly including Saudi Arabia.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
It was pretty obvious what they meant even without looking at the hyperlinks.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
The real answer is that the oil companies want more profit. But don't worry, when oil prices go back up again, or even look like they might go back up again, the gas prices will rise. No Lag. No "cost of oil is a small factor" nonsense. And you are right, while gasoline prices have gone down, they have not gone down as much as they should have or as quickly as they should based on the oil prices.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
What do you imagine "selling at a loss" even means, when your marginal-cost-per-sale is as near zero as makes no difference?
Of course publishers will set the price of a game as high as they think they can, for the volume of sales they want to achieve. What else would you expect them to do? What would you do?
If you think a game is overpriced, here's an idea: don't buy it.