For years the cheapest way to own a Steam library was to own it in the wrong
country. A game that cost sixty dollars in Germany cost the equivalent of ten
in Turkey or Argentina, and a Steam account whose store sat in one of those
countries was a discount that never expired. People bought such accounts, and
the searches for them have outlived the thing they were searching for.
In November 2023 Valve switched the Turkish and Argentine stores from their
local currencies to US-dollar pricing, with regional price tiers set by Valve
rather than by the exchange rate. The lira and the peso had fallen so far that
local prices had become a fraction of everywhere else, and the fix was to
stop pricing in them at all.
The effect on an account is simple. A Turkish store still exists and still
has its own prices, but they are now dollar prices in a tier Valve controls,
and the tier is far closer to the European and American ones than the
lira-era prices were. The discount did not vanish entirely — Valve's
recommended regional pricing for lower-income regions still sits below the
US baseline — but the gap that made a Turkish account a financial instrument
is gone. Argentina is the same story.
Regions that never had the extreme collapse — Brazil, India, Indonesia,
Kazakhstan and a number of others — still carry their own regional pricing
in local currency or in a lower dollar tier, and those are where a genuine
regional discount still lives today.
The region is a property of the account, and it decides three things: the
prices you see, the currency you pay in, and which payment methods Steam will
accept from you. That last one is the trap.
- You cannot pay from anywhere. A Turkish store wants a Turkish payment
method, or a Steam wallet code in the store's currency, or gift cards —
each with their own rules and checks. A European card on a Turkish account
is exactly the situation Valve's system is built to refuse.
- Changing the region is possible, but gated. Steam lets you move the
store country only when you complete a purchase with a payment method from
the new country, and it limits how often the country can move. So an
account in the wrong region is not a quick fix away from the right one; it
is a purchase away, in a country you may not be able to pay in.
- Regional games are locked to the region. Some titles bought at a
regional price are region-locked and will not launch elsewhere. This is
rarer than it was, but it is not gone, and a library bought cheaply in one
country is not automatically a library you can play in another.
So a cheap-region account is only a bargain if you can shop in that region.
If you cannot, the region is a liability: a store you cannot use, a currency
you cannot pay in, and a library that may not all run.
We sell Steam accounts with the store country read from the account data, so
we can measure what region does to price. The table is read from the live
shelf as you open this page:
Read it against the shelf-wide median of .
When this page was first written, Turkey and Argentina did not appear in that
table at all — no accounts from either region were on the shelf, and it looked
as though the supply had dried up with the discount. That is no longer what the
table shows, and the way it changed is the useful part: where Turkish and
Argentine accounts appear now, they appear above the shelf median, not
below it.
That is the regional-pricing story told backwards, and it is consistent with
everything above. The discount was on future purchases, and it is gone. But
an account that already holds a library bought at the old regional prices is
carrying that library at full value — the games do not get cheaper because the
store did — and a buyer who wants those games pays for what is there, not for
what the store now charges. The old cheap regions have turned into the shelf's
old-library regions, and the price reflects the library.
What is still cheap is the regions where accounts were made to buy one or two
games at a local price and hold little else — Indonesia and India sit at a
fraction of the median for that reason, not because of the store. The full
breakdown of what actually sets a Steam account's price is in
how much is a Steam account worth;
the short version is that the library's size barely matters and the account's
level and CS2 history matter a lot, whichever region it shops in.
Only if the region is one you can actually use, and then only for the library
that is already on it. Buying an account to keep shopping cheaply in its
region needs a payment method from that region, which most people searching
for these accounts do not have — and Valve's checks on wallet codes and gift
cards from other countries have tightened every year.
Buying it for what it already contains is a different question, and a fair
one: the games on the account are yours to play wherever they are not region
locked, and the price of an Indonesian account with a real library reflects
its store, not its games. Read the card for the library, check the region
against how you will pay, and treat the region as permanent.
A Steam account belongs to the country of its store. Before you look at the
library, ask whether you can pay in that country; if you cannot, the account
is a library you can play but a store you cannot use, and it should be priced
like one. The Steam shelf shows the store country on every card
for exactly this reason.
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