Newsbrief: Steam’s regional pricing feature allows devs to sell games for different prices depending on where the purchaser is located, a utility that aims to scale each game’s price to better match income in different countries throughout the world.
While the system makes buying reasonably priced games a possibility for people in countries where $60 USD is an unreasonable sum, the well-intended feature also makes it possible for Steam users to purchase games way below the going rate for their actual country of residence.
Steam’s latest change aims to make regional pricing much harder to abuse by decreasing how many times Steam users can change their account’s location.
Changes spotted by the folks at SteamDB note that, moving forward, an account’s country can only be changed once every 3 months. This follows other changes over the years meant to cut down on unscrupulous use of regional pricing such as requiring an account’s location to match that of its payment method.