The big picture: Valve ahead of its Steam Summer Sale has quietly made a change that will make it harder for people to switch regions to score better deals on games. But if that doesn't apply to you, continue on because the annual sales event is now live!
The practice, referred to by some as touring, involves changing the region setting on your Steam account to take advantage of sales or lower prices that might be available to consumers in other areas. Per the Steam Database Twitter account, Valve has added a restriction that prevents users from updating their country more than once every three months.
In a further crack down on people buying games in cheaper regions, Valve added a limit on how often you can change your Steam account's country.
--- Steam Database (@SteamDB) June 23, 2021
Country may not be updated more than once every 3 months. Purchases can be completed using a payment method from your current region.
It's not a perfect solution, however, as it will no doubt be a headache for frequent travelers that genuinely do access their account and make purchases from different countries on a regular basis.
Valve's annual Steam Summer Sale is now in full effect. As usual, there's no shortage of discounts across virtually every genre. Highlights include 75 percent off Battlefield V Definitive Edition (yours for just $12.99), Cities: Skylines (down to $7.49) and Kerbal Space Program (now $10) as well as half off Mortal Kombat 11 (down to $29.99) and Halo: The Master Chief Collection (now only $19.99).
Are you planning to pick up anything this time around? I'm seriously on the fence about Cities Skylines as I've been watching a lot of the City Planner Plays YouTube channel lately. My outdated CPU doesn't meet the recommended hardware requirements but I think the mediocre GTX 1050 should make up for it.
The Steam Summer Sale runs through July 8.