It's now going to be harder to buy games cheaply if you're from a first world country, as Steam is finally beginning to crack down on account region s

Steam Cracks Down On Account Region Swapping Abuse

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2021-06-23 18:30:02

It's now going to be harder to buy games cheaply if you're from a first world country, as Steam is finally beginning to crack down on account region swapping abuse. Check out the comment that was tweeted by Steam Database below:

In a further crack down on people buying games in cheaper regions, Valve added a limit on how often you can change your Steam account's country.

Country may not be updated more than once every 3 months. Purchases can be completed using a payment method from your current region

Interesting stuff, and the situation around region swapping was covered further a week ago in the GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter. In it, Simon Carless talked about how a unnamed Steam developer noted that their Argentinan game sales are suspiciously high. How is that the case? Well, they were 6-7% of their total sales, and Argentina has around 44 million people compared to Brazil's 210 million population. Why is that the case? Well, check this out:

Basically, the Argentinian version of Dicey Dungeons is 87.4% cheaper than the American Dollar equivalent, which means that certain enterprising souls can buy games relatively cheaply if they can finagle it. How? Well, it's rather simple: use a VPN. Or, you used to be able to until a few months ago. Now you apparently have to buy a Steam game with a local payment method. So, basically, if you want to buy a Argentina-priced game, you now have to buy "with a credit or debit card from Argentina or the country where the region will be changed."