Recently I discovered the joys of the good side of regional pricing (see my purchases from the recent Steam sale - Yes, Skyrim Legendary Edition for less than $5 USD versus the $12.49 that us Australians would normally have to pay from the Steam store). I spent a bit of time in the last few weeks looking at regional price differences and I was astounded by how much you could save by buying from different regions. I knew Australians paid exorbitant prices set by publishers but I realised I could save 50-60% just by purchasing from a different region. (If anyone here actually does have access to regions where games are much cheaper, I seriously recommend looking at what you can save using https://www.steamprices.com/ and it may shock you. Here's an example.)
The downside of buying from other regions is, of course, that everything you buy is region locked. This means you can basically only buy for yourself unless your friends are also using the Steam store from the cheaper region as you are. Steam also imposes a 1 week cooldown before you can change the region again so you can't always switch to take advantage of all the deals (e.g. I wanted Watch_Dogs which was actually much cheaper for Australians but I decided not to change back to Australia to take advantage of the deal just in case there were other games I wanted to buy in the other region).
Now comes the small ethical issue I've been considering for the past hour or so:
If you have a few friends who aren't fortunate enough to purchase games with better pricing and you all decide you want to play a multiplayer game that has a group buy option available (i.e. a 4-pack deal) but your other region allows you to get a single of the game cheaper than splitting the group buy option. Assume you're needed in order for there to not be extra copies leftover. Also, for the sake of simplicity, let's just assume that the other parties can't be bothered to go through the inconvenience of going with the option that results in the smaller total for all parties and splitting that total.
I personally think if you value your friendship(s) you'd pay a bit more so they can get their games cheaper even if it's against the OzBargain spirit. But I think it's still an interesting topic and I'd like to see the perspectives of other people.
If you pick "Other" in the poll, please tell me what you'd do.
This is like me and my best mate he only plays games on his PS4 and i only play on pc… so we can never play together that part is fine i guess. But the difference in game prices is pretty big. i brought battlefield 4 ages ago premium edition and its now only dropped to the same price on ps4. now days its starting to settle down a bit like battlefront was the same price on all platforms for the pre-orders.
what games can you group buy?