Let’s say that in New Zealand a game unlocks 12 hours earlier than in your own region. This allows you to use a VPN to spoof your location and gain access to a different region’s store. On Steam the store is based on your IP address location. Unlocking a game is completely fine and doesn’t violate anything in the ToS. Doing so is a direct violation of Steam’s Terms of Service and can result in a ban of your Steam account. It is important to note, does not buy a game from a different region’s store. Tips, tricks, and interesting finds are often discussed and one region having access to this earlier than another can easily fragment a player base.

The Dark Souls community really relies on that sense of wonder, adventure and discovery. Dark Souls 3 recently for example caught some flak for releasing earlier in different regions. This is still a big issue in many gaming communities. Thankfully these staggered releases are slowly being phased out, quite often many of the biggest games are being released worldwide on a Tuesday. I can remember my younger self, wondering who was responsible for the injustice of the oft-common Friday release in the UK. Post 2006 saw games in the US usually release on a Tuesday, Europe Wednesday and the UK a Friday. This is not a hard and fast rule though with Steam sometimes releasing some of the Big Name games at various other times (e.g. What time do Steam games unlock?ĭuring 2023 we have found that in most cases the majority of Steam games are released to the general public at 10 AM PST. In the pre PS360 era it was not uncommon for those in Europe to be waiting months after their US counterparts for a game release (if games ever released at all!).

Though the trend of having staggered release dates for games has slowly waned as digital stores have become more and more popular there are a few games that still adhere to the regional staggered release method.

These 90 million users come from all around the world and this means there are many different time zones and release schedules. SHORT ON TIME ? – we highly recommend ExpressVPN to unlock games early on Steam, they have a fast and simple interface to bypass Steam restrictions.

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