Regional Price Differences

[FindingBoundaries]

I'm once again doing a steam advent calendar for my boyfriend. He lives in a different country and I'm scheduling 24 games to be delivered to him in December. It's sooooo frustrating to pick a game, or a few games to try and send at once and then you get hit with the "due to regional price differences, the gift you are trying to send cannot be sent to the recipient's region."

Can steam fix this to either give you the option to pay the regional price difference OR tell you when you select the recipient if it'll send. I'm exhausted of typing my gift message, doing my signature, choosing the date and time to be delivered all for it to not work.

OH! And on top of that if I try too many games I get hit with "It looks like you've been attempting a lot of purchases in the last few hours. Please wait a while before trying again."

HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO SEE WHAT GAMES I CAN SEND IF I CAN ATTEMPT 5 TIMES BEFORE BEING LOCKED OUT!

[Chika Ogiue]

Steam DB. Look up the pricing in your region and the pricing in his region. Calculate the difference.

Alternatively, use a browser such as Chrome with the Augmented Steam extension. Then you can configure* that to show you the pricing in his region as an option. This will automatically indicate the price difference percentage. But note it won't work in certain circumstances, such as with bundles.

* Settings > Price > Regional Price Comparison

[rawWwRrr]

The process could be improved, but the one thing that won't change is the option to pay the difference. There are many laws to prevent that so even if Valve wanted to they couldn't.

Use SteamDB.info to research prices. You can set the currency on the site to yours and it will show you the prices for games in the other regions with their associated percentage difference. Anything above 10% difference would be considered off limits.

[Chompman]

You can send them digital steam gift cards located here:

https://store.steampowered.com/digitalgiftcards/selectgiftcard

Steam can't do anything such as letting you pay the difference as this is a legal issue they cannot bypass as the listed price they show you has to be what you pay as "bait and switch" is illegal.

[ReBoot]

Sadly there'd a lot of braindead morons in this world. Technically, nothing speaks against changing the price on checkout with a warning on the likes of "For global market reasons, what you'll be paying isn't whta you saw on the store page. CHECK CAREFLLY WHETHER OYU WANT TO PROCEED!"

Abroad taxes aren't a problem as those are already solved within the 10% Corridor.

Sadly, intelligence and entitlement don't correlate (some say, they're the exact opposite). There will be ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ as entitled as they're dumb who will ignore this warning, then see that their bank deduced another number of currency units than they saw on the store and will complain, said complaints rising to politicians who will have to cater to ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ to some extent and that's why we can't have nice things.

[Nx Machina]

Originally posted by FindingBoundaries:

Can steam fix this to either give you the option to pay the regional price difference

Nothing to fix as Valve can only legally charge you the price as shown at checkout regarding your store region and currency. The price includes the appropriate amount of tax for your region. They cannot charge you more nor can they charge you less than the total asked for.

Secondly you can guarantee as Reboot pointed out someone will forget they agreed to pay the regional price difference and complain to their local consumer agency, politician why they paid more for game X.

As for:

Originally posted by FindingBoundaries:

OR tell you when you select the recipient if it'll send. I'm exhausted of typing my gift message, doing my signature, choosing the date and time to be delivered all for it to not work.

I am not exactly sure how Steam a program can know until you click confirm as what you are asking for it to do is check your friends list to see where people are located in the world. You could argue that would not be a problem BUT it would have to do that for everyone who is gifting.

You could send them a Steam Digital Gift Card or buy from reputable key sites and send them the keys.