… or how to play a game when it hasn’t been released in your region yet, and maybe get a cheaper price as well.

Buying the game

This is the easiest part. If the game is available for purchase in your region, you can just go ahead and purchase it.

If the game on Steam isn’t available in your region or you want to pay in USD and get the American price, register for Entropay. Entropay provides you with a virtual credit card. They charge you 4,95% of your usage, but the bonus is that Entropay doesn’t validate your address, so the check on Steam is successful as long as you can write a sane looking address and write the name as “ENTROPAY USER”.

After you have registered for your account, navigate to the game page on steampowered.com and append ?cc=us to the store URL and bingo, the currency is USD. Buy the game – either from a dummy account (and gift the game to your self) or from your real account.

Decrypting the game

If it’s a game that need decrypting, get ProxyCap or SocksCap somewhere. Install and register for Your Freedom as well. ProxyCap allows you to force traffic from a specific program through a specific proxy. Your Freedom allows you to set up a local proxy that routes all traffic through a country of your choosing. So set up a rule in ProxyCap that routes Steam-traffic through YF and select a US-server in YF. Then you start Steam, start the game and watch as the game decrypts.

Playing the game

If you’re lucky the game is playable the normal way through Steam. If it’s not, you need to start the game with Steam being routed through YF via ProxyCap. With “World of Goo” it wasn’t necessary to route Steam through ProxyCap. With “Dragon Age: Origins” it was necessary until the game was made available in Europe three days after the American release.

Enjoy your cheap, maybe unreleased, game.

Posted in: Games