That's basically the long and short of it. I'm trying to buy some games as a gift but the resulting price has increased more than 60% during checkout. Let me guess, regional pricing?

Well, if it wasn't for this feature, we would all ask you to buy us games in Uruguay prices:)

That sucks. Off to Steam then.

Technically the regional pricing is your price, while the gift price is the normal/base price. Gifts can't be purchased for less than the base price, so if you're in a region that pays more than the base price, you get the inflated price whether you buy for yourself or as a gift, and if you're in a region that pays less, you get the discounted price if you buy for yourself but the base price if you buy as a gift.

Correct me if I'm wrong but Steam also has regional pricing, right? And yet the system works differently?

If I buy a game to give to a friend, I can only give it to friends that's in the same country I'm in IE:

This is a restricted gift which can only be redeemed in these countries: South Africa

That's exactly what I wanted!

I was expecting them to go the same route as GOG but for now they haven't. Basically, they do have regional pricing, and you can buy gifts for that regional pricing for friends, however only for friends who live in regions that have similar pricing. I think the cutoff point is ~10% pricing difference or something like that.

The big negative there is that, ever since they implemented that, it cut off gifting games to people in regions that have significantly different prices than your region does. Rather than implementing a similar system to GOG they opted to implement digital wallet gift cards which can be given to any region. More of a workaround than a solution.

No idea how Steam works, and I'm vehemently against regional pricing in any way, shape or form. But I guess they could have made two kinds of gift options for those in regions that get discounts, one at the discounted price which can be redeemed only by those in regions with the same or lower price, and one at the base price which can be redeemed by anyone. Which, of course, would just be worse from the point of view of someone who is only interested in how to eliminate regional pricing (again), but either way, they don't.

GOG's way of handling gifts with region pricing is overall much better than Steam's, but we really would benefit of having the option of buying games on behalf of another account using the recipient's pricing instead of the purchaser's or the global price.

Also, in cases like this where the gift price differs from the regular price it would avoid the sort of confusion we had here if a clear notice that this is happening is shown on the checkout page.

Which system is better would really depend on your optics. If you're someone in a region that pays less than than the GOG global pricing and the friends you gift games to are within your own region/country anyway there's no doubt Steam's system is better for you.

If on the other hand you're someone who has a habit of gifting games to people on a global scale then Steam's version is definitely more confusing and GOG's way of doing it is better.

As for the notion that you should be able to buy a game for another account for their regional pricing, that's just opening up another line of abuse, both with people creating an account that's supposedly in a cheap region and buying games for themselves on that account, but more importantly payment fraud with third party 'sellers' providing cheap games only to be paid for with fraudulent methods and ending up either out of GOG's pocket and potentially a line of disgruntled customers who get their games revoked as a result.

If you have your answer, then please mark the relevant post as the solution. That way other people can see the question has been answered and quickly jump to the answer.

loser