Anyone ever purchase Steam keys from outside the US?

[RedBeard]

There are a handful of sites selling Steam keys from Europe and Russian that are sometimes cheaper than the best prices over here.

I know the Russian ones usually require you to connect to a VPN so your source IP is Russian when you activate, but after that you are set. They games are "world wide" releases are are also supposed to be in English.

I have been doing some searching and they look legit, but I have not tried them yet.

 

[novasatori]

Personally, I would avoid it. I've seen a lot of posts, even on these very forums, by people losing their games after activating them and using them for awhile, because they were from a different region.

 

[Texashiker]

Saving a few dollars is not worth the risk of getting your steam account disabled.

 

[MiataNC]

I purchased a Euro(UK) Steam key for IL2:Cliffs of Dover, because the US release was delayed.

It loaded fine in Steam and downloaded/installed without any issues. It also remains up to date with the cloud patches/etc. I am an avid flight-simmer, so I took a chance on this turkey (the game still hasn't been patched up to snuff).

I am not sure I would make a habit of buying out of region Steam keys, but if the price was right, and I wanted a game bad enough to risk it, I would do it again.

 

[Fallen Kell]

If you do this, make a new separate steam account for those games. The last thing you want to happen is that they suspend/ban you and as a result you lose access to all your games that you purchased.

 

[RedBeard]

I purchased a Euro(UK) Steam key for IL2:Cliffs of Dover, because the US release was delayed.

It loaded fine in Steam and downloaded/installed without any issues. It also remains up to date with the cloud patches/etc. I am an avid flight-simmer, so I took a chance on this turkey (the game still hasn't been patched up to snuff).

I am not sure I would make a habit of buying out of region Steam keys, but if the price was right, and I wanted a game bad enough to risk it, I would do it again.

Thanks for sharing your experience. Can you tell me what service you used?

 

[RedBeard]

Saving a few dollars is not worth the risk of getting your steam account disabled.

In some cases we are talking a lot more than a few $$$. Especially for newer titles.

 

[felang]

I´ve bought russian versions of COD releases because they are usually about $20-$30 cheaper than buying directly from steam. They have worked fine, although I did use a different Steam account for those games just in case.

 

[Oakenfold]

Saving a few dollars is not worth the risk of getting your steam account disabled.

This.

 

[lord_emperor]

Ah, the wonders of Steam. Buy a game in a region other than your own and risk the company shutting off access to all your games.

 

[PieIsAwesome]

I've purchased boxed retail copies of some games from India. Activated fine on steam with no problems. Region-limits are game-specific, and the games I bought had no limits.

I wouldn't buy the key by itself, may have been stolen.

 

[Nebor]

Ah, the wonders of Steam. Try to scam Valve by circumventing their regional sales system and risk the company shutting off access to all your games.

Fixed.

 

[bononos]

Steam/Valve banned me for hacking despite the fact that I did nothing of the sort. It years back when I played CS. I later realised that Steam did the delayed ban thing because my Steam connection was flaky before a month or so before the ban was finally happened.
I was pretty irritated because I was suffering horribly in CS where many players had hacks to do leaping headshots with scouts.

 

[The Green Bean]

I've never heard of an account being banned because someone used a Russian keys. It's a sort of thing the folks at Steam would like you to believe, but it won't happen.

 

[Elcs]

What if someone from the UK purchased a legit UK Steam Key from one of these places?

 

[greenhawk]

IIRC it was a big enough issue originally as I remember a large number of US accounts being locked back when TF2 was released (or some just as popular game). Steam cracked down on it rather hard due to the numbers involoved.

I assume one here and one their is not going to upsetup, but at some point with enough people doing it, it will happen again.

Personally, I do not care about it for most games, not because of the lower price, but because the asking price in this country is HIGHER than the US price. Steam points at the publishers as wanting it that way, and they set the price as the retail stores demand no competition with them. As to buying form cheaper countries, I hear some in my country still have region issues with some games like EA and such, but that runs beyond steam and to the actual registration. I use to order from Thailand, but that pretty much stopped when EA and some others started refusing game registrations if purchased from outside your region.

Personally, now I buy from the UK/Europe, but am paying aprox US prices anyway, so stuff the high prices here. Most of those are listed as US cd keys anyway, so their should be no issues in buying "cheap" games.

On a side note, I suspect when you buy it plays a part in how anal valve might be as well. Getting it within the first week or two at a price massivly cheaper than the RRP might get them worked up enough to look at banning accounts assuming they have been "hacked". (it appears one of the checks for hacked accounts, login in from two locations quickly that are a LONG way apart).

As a example in my case, RAGE is listed at about $80US (or was that $89.99US). for my country (AU). Charge more, and still do not use the local currency. A CD key was $45US from one site, but went with a store that posted the CD to me, so $40 delivered from the UK. Price difference is just too wrong for something delivered over the internet that I have to pay for delivery for anyway (data is far more expencive than most western countries).

So in short I think it comes down to the number of people doing it, and from were. Buying from Asia is sure to tick them off very fast though.

 

[Fallen Kell]

So in short I think it comes down to the number of people doing it, and from were. Buying from Asia is sure to tick them off very fast though.

Well, they (as in corporations) are the ones who keep saying it is a "global economy and marketplace", and that is the excuse to ship jobs overseas and outsource services to cheaper locations. Well, it is about time that we as consumers use it to the same advantage. If the same product is available elsewhere for less, I say we should buy it there. If that means I need to create separate online accounts to do that, fine. This is what the whole "free trade" is all about, but the guys making the products certainly don't want you to know about that, they just want it to be cheaper for them to make the product but keep their same high prices in the markets that historically could afford those prices.

 

[Dankk]

What if someone from the UK purchased a legit UK Steam Key from one of these places?

Then you should be fine, assuming it's a legit key.

I learned there are actually websites that do this. CJS Keys is a store that stocks thousands of legitimate copies of games, and simply sells the keys online for damn cheap. You can buy Battlefield 3 for $39.99. If you look at the Steam section, they have Space Marine for £17.99, Dead Island for £21.99, and Deus Ex: HR for £22.99, among others. They seem sketchy at first, but apparently they've been around for quite a while, and they get favorable reviews.

Not an advertisement, I don't work for them, but it was on the front page of Reddit today and I thought it was interesting.

And yeah, they have keys for North America.

Edit: This is what was posted on Reddit. I guess it was mostly intended to stir up hype for BF3, but you can see it's from CJS Keys:

 

[littlejimm]

Not sure if this qualifies for your question, but I did purchase Fallout 3New Vegas on base in Germany. Didn't know that it required steam to install which in itself wasn't a huge deal since I already have a steam account with several games. The problem came from the fact that Steam saw my IP coming from Germany so it downloaded the ONLY available version for Germany which is the low-violence German version.

"Low violence" wouldn't have really been a deal breaker, but German with absolutely no workaround to make the game use English made the game unplayable. When I got back to the States, I thought i could just redownload the game and it would properly see "He needs the english version". Ohhhh no, Steam locked out the game from use entirely.

 

[Jschmuck2]

Steam/Valve banned me for hacking despite the fact that I did nothing of the sort. It years back when I played CS. I later realised that Steam did the delayed ban thing because my Steam connection was flaky before a month or so before the ban was finally happened.
I was pretty irritated because I was suffering horribly in CS where many players had hacks to do leaping headshots with scouts.

VAC delays the ban on purpose.

 

[Mike Gayner]

Steam/Valve banned me for hacking despite the fact that I did nothing of the sort. It years back when I played CS. I later realised that Steam did the delayed ban thing because my Steam connection was flaky before a month or so before the ban was finally happened.
I was pretty irritated because I was suffering horribly in CS where many players had hacks to do leaping headshots with scouts.

I have yet to see a genuine case of a false-positive VAC-ban.

 

[bononos]

VAC delays the ban on purpose.

Yes I know. I found out about their delayed ban method after I got locked out.

 

[bononos]

I have yet to see a genuine case of a false-positive VAC-ban.

AKA it never happened to me so I have yet to see a genuine case...

Well it happens. I suspect it happened when I blocked punk buster related processes with my sw firewall which made steam think that it was hacked for cheating. When I changed it back later to remove the punkbuster process from being blocked by the firewall, it was already too late.

Funny thing is that I purchased 2 copies of HL1EP1 because I forgot the login password and email addy for steam once and just went out and bought another box instead of going through the hassle of resetting everything (not sure if it can even be done). Now I'm not sure if I can even reset and use the 2nd retail copy that I have since I'm that I'm in the blacklist.

 

[The Green Bean]

Just don't buy Valve games, they won't work. Valve games are region locked and the Russian version will not only not activate, but won't work even if you activated by VPN. Most other region locked games will work fine if activated at place of purchase.

 

[HardcoreRobot]

i have bought from greenmangames and gamersgate, no problems with either