Valve cracks down on Steam VPN use by limiting account country changes

A lot of PC gamers at one point or another have used a VPN to buy a game from a country where it is sold at a cheaper price. Moving forward, doing this on Steam is going to be much more difficult, as Valve has implemented some changes to discourage this practice. 

Some developers and publishers will lower the price of their games in specific countries due to lower average income. Previously, Valve has tried to use region-specific game keys to curb VPN use for cheaper game prices, but geo-blocking content isn't legal in all countries. In fact, Valve and a number of other game publishers and developers were fined by the EU for these practices.

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.

— Steam Database (@SteamDB) June 23, 2021

Valve now has a new plan to discourage VPN use. Moving forward, Steam users can only change their account's country once every three months.

Of course, Valve does have other methods in place too, such as requiring the use of a payment method from the country your trying to purchase a game from. With this measure in place, you couldn't use a UK bank card to buy a game on the Russian Steam Store or vice versa.

KitGuru Says: What do you all think of this latest change to Steam? 

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