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KiNgBrAdLeY7: I don't know about others, but myself, i never thought that Valve couldn't get any lower. Valve has the potential to reach minus infinite, the lowliest of the low. Just give the guys some time... They won't disappoint. Are going to deliver for sure.
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DivisionByZero.620: If this trend continues, in 1-2 years, EA Origin might actually be better than Steam.
To be fair, Origin has never been any worse than Steam. It just doesn't have the same cult-like fans that act like Gabe Newell is Emanuel.
From a consumer's point of view:

I have to pay full price now? Fuck that, I want to use my Western salary to buy all the games at Eastern prices. It is not fair that in countries where the economy is tanking, the poor people get to buy cheap games with their little to nothing expendable income. Fuck steam and their greediness! Those bastards are the scum of the earth and I bet they gave Sidney Crosby the mumps...fuckers! Selling all those those game keys to people 99% of which are not available on GOG, so they really are not hurting us here at all. They found out that tone of of are getting their $30 games for $10 or less worth of TF2 keys...and their clients, the game devs are getting screwed out of millions of dollars, so I bet they asked steam to do something about it.

From a game Developers point of view:

Fuck those filthy American bastards who are buying the game that I sell on the US market for $30 off of Russian or Brazilian Traders for $10 or less...that is $20 I lose every time someone does that...Steam needs to stop allowing this, it has been getting worse and worse since regional pricing was introduced. I was cool with a little trading, and even understood that a little exploitation would occur, but the fuckers are telling their friends and soon no one will pay full price to buy the keys which after I pay the coders and the testers the peanuts that they get, I will not have enough profits to go on trips to the moon, and my stock prices will not go up so that I can dump all of my options for millions when I retire. Fucking cheapass gamers!!

From Gabe's point of view:

Fuck, no matter if I side with the gamers or the producers, I am fucked. Well I hope enough of the gamers are all Gabe is God crazy, to keep my image ok after this...*Shakes Magic 8Ball* Ok then no more trading...
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MarioFanaticXV: To be fair, Origin has never been any worse than Steam.
This is of course said from an US perspective. Using a DD shop with a language of my choice and a currency of my choice to buy a game version of my choice is something, that only GOG allows. Humble and Steam force me to a currency but at least leave the language choice for the shop and for some games (except censored ones).

Origin is the worst: By GeoIP you get forced into a foreign shop with no options to change anything. So know your French well, if you reside in the "wrong" part of Belgium. ;-) That also means, if you don't know the foreign name of an EA game, you can't even find it.

Unlike the regional Amazon store, which has very professional customer communication, EA's regional store for my country talks to the customer with some sort of language I heard the last time in Nintendo TV ads during the 90s: appropriate for 9-12 years old teenagers. But I'm triple that age and if EA expects me to shell out money, I expect to be politely addressed like an adult.

On top of that, EA's games are translated (and recut) in a similar fashion for this demography and they sometimes give you no choice to change the language to the original one intended by the developer (most recent example: Dragon Age Inquisition).
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MarioFanaticXV: To be fair, Origin has never been any worse than Steam.
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jtsn: This is of course said from an US perspective.
I'll grant, you're entirely right, I can only comment from the perspective of a English-speaking United States user, and really can't say anything about how they handle other regions.
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DivisionByZero.620: If this trend continues, in 1-2 years, EA Origin might actually be better than Steam.
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MarioFanaticXV: To be fair, Origin has never been any worse than Steam. It just doesn't have the same cult-like fans that act like Gabe Newell is Emanuel.
Oh it most certainly has. Only recently has Origin fixed a lot of it's problems but when it launched it was absolutely diabolical.
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iphgix: From a consumer's point of view:

I have to pay full price now? Fuck that, I want to use my Western salary to buy all the games at Eastern prices. It is not fair that in countries where the economy is tanking, the poor people get to buy cheap games with their little to nothing expendable income. Fuck steam and their greediness! Those bastards are the scum of the earth and I bet they gave Sidney Crosby the mumps...fuckers! Selling all those those game keys to people 99% of which are not available on GOG, so they really are not hurting us here at all. They found out that tone of of are getting their $30 games for $10 or less worth of TF2 keys...and their clients, the game devs are getting screwed out of millions of dollars, so I bet they asked steam to do something about it.

From a game Developers point of view:

Fuck those filthy American bastards who are buying the game that I sell on the US market for $30 off of Russian or Brazilian Traders for $10 or less...that is $20 I lose every time someone does that...Steam needs to stop allowing this, it has been getting worse and worse since regional pricing was introduced. I was cool with a little trading, and even understood that a little exploitation would occur, but the fuckers are telling their friends and soon no one will pay full price to buy the keys which after I pay the coders and the testers the peanuts that they get, I will not have enough profits to go on trips to the moon, and my stock prices will not go up so that I can dump all of my options for millions when I retire. Fucking cheapass gamers!!

From Gabe's point of view:

Fuck, no matter if I side with the gamers or the producers, I am fucked. Well I hope enough of the gamers are all Gabe is God crazy, to keep my image ok after this...*Shakes Magic 8Ball* Ok then no more trading...
Looks about right to me. Worded better than I would have managed too.

Frankly, I don't see what the big deal is?
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iphgix: From a consumer's point of view:

I have to pay full price now? Fuck that, I want to use my Western salary to buy all the games at Eastern prices. It is not fair that in countries where the economy is tanking, the poor people get to buy cheap games with their little to nothing expendable income. Fuck steam and their greediness! Those bastards are the scum of the earth and I bet they gave Sidney Crosby the mumps...fuckers! Selling all those those game keys to people 99% of which are not available on GOG, so they really are not hurting us here at all. They found out that tone of of are getting their $30 games for $10 or less worth of TF2 keys...and their clients, the game devs are getting screwed out of millions of dollars, so I bet they asked steam to do something about it.

From a game Developers point of view:

Fuck those filthy American bastards who are buying the game that I sell on the US market for $30 off of Russian or Brazilian Traders for $10 or less...that is $20 I lose every time someone does that...Steam needs to stop allowing this, it has been getting worse and worse since regional pricing was introduced. I was cool with a little trading, and even understood that a little exploitation would occur, but the fuckers are telling their friends and soon no one will pay full price to buy the keys which after I pay the coders and the testers the peanuts that they get, I will not have enough profits to go on trips to the moon, and my stock prices will not go up so that I can dump all of my options for millions when I retire. Fucking cheapass gamers!!

From Gabe's point of view:

Fuck, no matter if I side with the gamers or the producers, I am fucked. Well I hope enough of the gamers are all Gabe is God crazy, to keep my image ok after this...*Shakes Magic 8Ball* Ok then no more trading...
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hummer010: Looks about right to me. Worded better than I would have managed too.

Frankly, I don't see what the big deal is?
Me either. So some people can't game the system anymore and buy steam games way lower than what is intended in their home region. Cry me a friggin river.
I have to admit that when the changes were first announced I was pissed...because I had planned to game the system.
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MarioFanaticXV: To be fair, Origin has never been any worse than Steam. It just doesn't have the same cult-like fans that act like Gabe Newell is Emanuel.
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darthspudius: Oh it most certainly has. Only recently has Origin fixed a lot of it's problems but when it launched it was absolutely diabolical.
Once again, I'll concede that I've only been using Origin for about a year- I got Command & Conquer Ultimate Collection on Amazon's New Year's sale, and that's what prompted me to install Origin.
I don't blame them. The ways the system could be and was exploited were insane and frankly I'm just surprised it took them so long to take this step.
I am surprised steam is finally cracking down on this. I cant say exactly how this will effect gifts to friends but friend list trading should still be a thing since people buy stuff for them quite often. It is a very odd move and seems to be related with the inflation of the ruble and seems to be a blanket stop to after market key selling.
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qazx: I am surprised steam is finally cracking down on this. I cant say exactly how this will effect gifts to friends but friend list trading should still be a thing since people buy stuff for them quite often. It is a very odd move and seems to be related with the inflation of the ruble and seems to be a blanket stop to after market key selling.
Can be easily fixed by redirecting you to whoever you're gifting to's region, and letting you buy the gift in their regional price.
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darthspudius: Oh it most certainly has. Only recently has Origin fixed a lot of it's problems but when it launched it was absolutely diabolical.
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MarioFanaticXV: Once again, I'll concede that I've only been using Origin for about a year- I got Command & Conquer Ultimate Collection on Amazon's New Year's sale, and that's what prompted me to install Origin.
Can't really judge then...
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DivisionByZero.620: Did people hate Windows 8/8.1? Absolutely. It was actually damaging laptop/desktop manufacturers because people wanted Windows 7 and Microsoft refused to budge. Instead, the price of Windows 8/8.1 was discounted.
My neighbors called me over because they bought a new machine. I didn't think about it being Windows 8 until i was halfway across the street. Being Windows 8, i hate it, and i don't have anything that can get into it or around it, being as they forgot their password that would have been helpful.

Ended up convincing them to return it and getting a full refund, then disabling services they weren't using so their older machine was faster in the long run.

I'm looking forward to and actually am considering wiping my main system that has heating problems, and put a variant of Linux on it. I don't play games on it, hardly watch videos, it mostly acts as a file server for the other computers. That and programming.
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Leroux: So, to be sure I understood correctly - this means now even people from EU and US can't trade anymore because of price differences, but it would still be possible to gift games from EU or Austria to Germany, if they have the same pricing? And how will it affect keys from Humble bundles or ShinyLoot?
EU/UK & US can still trade. Quite visible in /r/steamgameswap, where people from the Philippines and Russia used to dominate, now it's savvy people from the US exploiting the pricing situation in EU/UK.

It's actually kind of an odd situation though, as publishers (when I refer to publishers I refer to self-published devs to, whomever had access to the steam backend of a title) already had full control over the trading situation. There's been no official word to the public as far as I know, just a few words to the publishers that it a sort of emergency response due to the falling ruble (which has a stabilized a little for now). The rest seems to be just hysteria and drawing conclusions.

Because publishers had full control, I never saw it as a "gray" market as a lot like to hype it up as. If a publisher didn't care enough to tradelock a region, then it seemed fair game to me. It also allowed people with lower wages to get games and such, especially though giftofgame and such.

The trio of TF2key limited tradelock + Gift limited tradelock + russia-inspired gift tradelock has made the one vibrant trading scene rather inconvenient now. Others from the US will come and cheer though because now they don't have to compete with anyone, such is the internets.
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iphgix: From a consumer's point of view:

I have to pay full price now? Fuck that, I want to use my Western salary to buy all the games at Eastern prices. It is not fair that in countries where the economy is tanking, the poor people get to buy cheap games with their little to nothing expendable income. Fuck steam and their greediness! Those bastards are the scum of the earth and I bet they gave Sidney Crosby the mumps...fuckers! Selling all those those game keys to people 99% of which are not available on GOG, so they really are not hurting us here at all. They found out that tone of of are getting their $30 games for $10 or less worth of TF2 keys...and their clients, the game devs are getting screwed out of millions of dollars, so I bet they asked steam to do something about it.

From a game Developers point of view:

Fuck those filthy American bastards who are buying the game that I sell on the US market for $30 off of Russian or Brazilian Traders for $10 or less...that is $20 I lose every time someone does that...Steam needs to stop allowing this, it has been getting worse and worse since regional pricing was introduced. I was cool with a little trading, and even understood that a little exploitation would occur, but the fuckers are telling their friends and soon no one will pay full price to buy the keys which after I pay the coders and the testers the peanuts that they get, I will not have enough profits to go on trips to the moon, and my stock prices will not go up so that I can dump all of my options for millions when I retire. Fucking cheapass gamers!!

From Gabe's point of view:

Fuck, no matter if I side with the gamers or the producers, I am fucked. Well I hope enough of the gamers are all Gabe is God crazy, to keep my image ok after this...*Shakes Magic 8Ball* Ok then no more trading...
Publishers have full price control, and full control over region tradelocking. Steam SUGGESTS price points, and has a popular tool to do so that a lot (sadly most) publishers just use to get default prices for other regions XD.
Post edited December 20, 2014 by MetalPlateMage