Be Excellent To Each Other

I've bought plenty of digital items from other countries without any problems - most of the time its easy to do but some require a little work to get around some of the obstacles that get put in your way.

The idea for this thread is to list the places you could buy stuff from , and problems or tips on how to do it and anything you specifically need to be aware off

For games you do need to be aware of region locking , Steam have this feature in place (although its seldom used outside of Deep Silver and Namco) but its there - you can work around this by using a VPN to unlock the game but there is the possibility that Valve could view this as a breach of their T&C so I'd advise against it.

The Xbox 360 and PS3 have region locking for certain titles but Microsoft and Sony have said that they will not region lock titles for the PS4 and Xbox One.
Nintendo region lock a lot of their systems (handhelds prior to the DSI are not but the 3DS is)

So if your unsure if something works then ask and it may be possible to check up on it.

You'll normally buy the item in that country's local currency and either with your own credit card of with papal , normally in the transaction you'll end up paying a premium from your bank to handle the transaction in another currency however this is normally only pennies.

*Most* of the time what your buying is a digital code that is the exact same as the code you would get for just buying the item in the UK (but a lot cheaper) but you do need to be aware that for some games you may have different languages available or limitations on what DLC or updates you can get because of where you bought the item from.


Not on here but on another forum I have had 'discussions' with people who view buying items like this on the same scale as piracy , if you have an ethical problem with doing this then that's fine dont do it - however I'm not interested in discussing what you find acceptable / not acceptable.

So what I know I can post on here is how to :

Buy Steam / Origin / u-Play games from Amazon.com

Buy US PSN voucher codes from Amazon.com to use on the US PSN store

Buy US PSN game codes from Amazon.com

Buy Steam titles from Poland (muve.pl)

Buy Origin titles from other regions (I've not done this but I understand and can write up the process - Lewie often posts these on his website as offers and if a game i really wanted came up this way then I probably would do it)

Buy books from Barnes and Noble (process would be the same for the Kobo US store)

Buying Steam / Origin / u-play codes from Amazon.com

Amazon as a global company will quite happily sell you digital items from the US as long as you have a US Address on file with them.

When Amazon started to sell digital items people realized they never send out anything to the address you give them so people either just made up an address or googled for a place they knew of and added that (Mcdonald's / hotels / The Whitehouse / etc)

I actually picked the offices of the company I work for since I reasoned that If anything went wrong I could legitimately get the item forwarded over to the UK and as they were based in Boston that was fine because they did not add on extra sales taxes (the US have different tax rates for each state) - however about a year ago Massachusetts changed their policy and introduced a sales tax so I looked at other options and ended up with Borderlinx

http://www.borderlinx.com/GB/en/

Borderlinx is a service that you can sign up to (for free) and they give you a valid US address in a state with no additional taxes and if you have something sent to that address they then parcel it up and mail it on to you (for a quite high fee)

If you add this address to your Amazon address book then Amazon will let you purchase Steam / Origin / u-play keys

These Keys are emailed out and are kept in your account page on Amazon.com - you simply open the service up - punch in the key and you have the game.

Amazon also do a number of sales (there is virtually always one on) and you'll find that buying games from their sale is normally cheaper than buying the title directly from the service

These are just here for examples I'd not suggest buying them now but are to show the price differences (Prototype and Prototype 2 are part of their sale today which is why they are listed the other three are just chosen at random)

Dark Souls : Prepare to die edition
Amazon.com $19.99 (£11.91)
Steam £19.99

Dark Souls II
Amazon.com $49.99 (£29.78)
Steam £39.99
(Amazon will also give you $5 off any future digital purchase for buying it from them)

Prototype
Amazon.com $5 (£2.97)
Steam £14.99

Prototype 2
Amazon.com $10 (£5.95)
Steam £19.99

Titanfall
Amazon.com $59.99 (£35.75)
Origin £44.99

I posted about buying US PSN codes and vouchers in the wongawatch thread yesterday which you can find here :

viewtopic.php?p=818985#p818985

You da man, man. You and PayPal.

Buy Steam titles from Poland (muve.pl)

So this one all goes through as normal but there are two caveats , the first is that they sell a lot of steam keys which can only be redeemed in Poland or in Eastern Europe - they are normally marked with the name and end in -PL (and normally *much* cheaper) but you need to be careful.

Also as part of their check out process to avoid fraud they ask you to enter a PESEL which is a polish social security number which you will not have.

http://www.muve.pl

Firstly their site is all in polish and the prices are listed as Zloty so if you use Chrome and select the translate option at the top it will switch things over for the text to English and you can use XE.com to work out how much you'll pay right now 5 Zloty is about £1

I found this a few weeks ago via a thread on Tedit where they were selling a number of old games for 10 to 15 zloty (so between £2 and £3)

http://www.reddit.com/r/GameDeals/comme ... ate_ninja/

And got pointed to this page : http://www.bogus.ovh.org/generatory/all.html which will give you a PESEL which the system would accept.

That sale is now over but they do come up reasonably often and if they are selling stuff for that type of price you may want to risk a few quid

Their last sale items included the original Dark Souls / Resident Evil 4 / Call of Duty Black ops (Mac version) all for between £2 and £3

Buy Origin titles from other regions

So I've not actually done this one yet but Savygamer often lists items which are 'unusual' prices in other regions - I remember at launch there were a number of people who were using the regional pricing differences to grab Titanfall on PC + DLC packs for around £20 by using a proxy to Mexico on the Origin website

Yesterday this was listed

http://savygamer.co.uk/2014/04/23/mirrors-edge-pc-73p/

Which is Mirrors edge for 73p (instead of £4.99)

The main thing here is to use Chrome as your browser (which will translate for you) and install an addon called 'hola unblocker'

https://hola.org/

This adds an extra icon to your toolbar and will allow you to 'appear' to be logged into the website from another region.

The mirrors edge link above basically means you use Hola on Origin to show you are connected from India , and add the game to your basket and click the button to check out

At this stage you can turn Hola off , login (with your regular account) and still pay the reduced price for the game.

Savygamer has lists of a number of items which are available via this method (usually switching to India / Mexico / Russia and back)

http://savygamer.co.uk/?s=hola+unblocker&submit=Ok