Summer has just begun, and that means the Steam Summer Sale is going to happen imminently. But before it does, Valve has quietly clamped down on the ability for Steam users to switch regions in an attempt to pay less for games, or access restricted content.
As Gamasutra reports, the change was first spotted by SteamDB. Valve has now added a limit on how often a Steam account region can be changed, with the new limit being once every three months. This change is in addition to the rule introduced last year that restricted game purchases to using a payment method from the country your Steam account region was set to.
Valve needed to implement such restrictions because some Steam users had started using virtual private networks (VPN) to get around region restrictions and pay lower prices for their games. Some content on Steam isn’t available in some regions, and pricing can vary per region due mainly to different tax rules. Disguising your real location is against Steam’s Terms of Service, but that didn’t stop individuals doing it anyway, so Valve has been forced to react.
Be restricting region changes to once every three months, it still allows someone who has genuinely moved countries to update their settings. At the same time, it stops Steam users jumping from region-to-region grabbing content cheaper than their real locations demands they pay.
We don’t know when the Steam Summer Sale is expected to start, but it could be as early as today according to Gamesradar. It will then run until July 8 and has a murder mystery theme this year if the rumors are to be believed.
