Why Steam Games Are Getting Mysterious Sale Spikes in Argentina

I observed multiple times how people from Russia approached Russian immigrants living in Argentina with proposals like that: Argentine person buys some game-related stuff online using Argentine credit/debit card. Then transfers stuff to Russian guy. And Russian guy pays back outside of Argentina in some other currency using favorable exchange rate (obviously better than blue rate)
 
Games are marketed at different places depending on your country of residence. Usually they take the source of payment as proof of residence, i.e. you need an Argentinian card to pay if you want to get Argie prices.
However, I think in Steam you need an Argie account to keep accessing your Argie-bought games. So you'd have to switch between accounts from different countries to get the best deal in games.
The price difference can be 50% or more if there is a parallel currency going on!

I remember that a decade ago I checked these prices and the Russian prices were 50% less than the European prices. However, you'd need a Russian account, and everything was in Cyrillic thereafter.
 
I observed multiple times how people from Russia approached Russian immigrants living in Argentina with proposals like that: Argentine person buys some game-related stuff online using Argentine credit/debit card. Then transfers stuff to Russian guy. And Russian guy pays back outside of Argentina in some other currency using favorable exchange rate (obviously better than blue rate)

Except this doesn't work anymore. It's been over a year since Steam banned gifting games to others in a different region.
 
Except this doesn't work anymore. It's been over a year since Steam banned gifting games to others in a different region.

I was contacted with similar proposition on Facebook fairly recently.
So I assume there are other channels other than Steam or gifting
 
I really hate to see this happening, because it's going to cause the end of regional pricing. There is a pattern we see over and over -

1) We have something nice.
2) The greedy abuse it.
3) Attention whores talk about it on social media, over-dramatizing and exaggerating.
4) It is taken away from us.
 
it's not greed, it's economic arbitrage...

One cannot create prices or artificial exchange rates out of thin air. Everything is interconnected.

A skunk by any other name...

Using a fancy word for it doesn't make it not be greed.
 
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