[quote name='Saablic']
Entitlement! You might as well just steal it since you don't want to pay what the company that has distribution rights decides. I am all for cheaper prices but I realize I am not entitled to have the game at whatever price I want. If they want to charge too much I just don't buy it until it is.
I mean we all know how greedy steam is. They rarely put anything on sale right? They are just trying to screw us out of money so how dare they ban someone for buying games from different distribution regions![/QUOTE]
Entitlement that I don't wish to spend more money than I have to? Christ, get over yourself and your magical high-horse. Do you buy your games directly from the publisher? Do you buy games at full MSRP? Why would I, as a consumer, not wish to shop around and save the maximum amount of money that I can?
The next then you'll tell me is I should never buy games second-hand from a person and not an establishment such a GameStop. After all, they don't have the rights to sell copywritten material because when you buy a game you aren't buying that product, just a right to play it at the publishers discretion.
And yeah, steam puts things on sale but XCOM isn't $30 right now, is it? And Saints Row: The Third wasn't $25 at launch, COD: MW3 wasn't $35, and Borderlands 2 wasn't $20 and yet those are the prices I paid at launch.
Are you really going to argue that people should be locked into paying the prices set for their regions? Because I'm sure Australians would love to hear that they need to constantly take it up the ass on prices when they could ask a friend to buy them the game for cheaper in their region and gift it over.
When I take my money over to another country my money doesn't stop having value, it just becomes more valuable or less depending on exchange rates and if I take advantage of that, that's being a smart consumer. Thanks to the internet, I can now do that from home and while it's Valve's right to step in and disagree with that as a private business, I (and many others) do not support punishing the consumer for doing whats in their best interest.
[quote name='CheapLikeAFox']Here's the thing, you are informed of the risks. Numerous unsuspecting CAGs have purchased from these postings thinking it is a legit retailer only to find it is an RU key. If these posts at least explained what was going on it wouldn't be as bad. It's not even from a moral high ground, it's because Steam can EASILY tell which keys were sold in which regions and if they wanted to they could easily remove all those keys from its servers if not activated in the correct region. At least with US sold keys they have no way of knowing if you got the key from Amazon or from someone who sold it second hand from Amazon. The risk is much less.[/QUOTE]
I will agree that people should know the risks and considering how these threads go, many people will hear all about them and be guilt-tripped into believing they are wrong for wanting to save money.
Many keys I've purchased have come in the form of an image that has full English text. Should I assume that they're evil Russian keys? Why would it even matter? What if a friend was in Russia on Holiday, purchased cheap games and gave me one as a gift on return? Should Valve ban users in that situation, if so, why?
All I can say is this: I have thirty-five games on Steam that I've purchased from a site like this and nothing has happened in that regard. Maybe they haven't caught up to my so-implied evil entitled activities yet and if they do then I guess I learned the lesson of not to try and save money.
You'd think though, that if Steam could easily tell which keys are "bad", they wouldn't let people use them in the wrong countries in the first place. Yet they do. Weird. It's almost as if they don't actually know that because it's up to the publisher to use region-locked keys like Call of Duty (which require a VPN, and is one of the most common games to get flagged due to said VPN usage) or region-free keys like THQ and other publishers use.