bait and switch laws as well as tax laws say no.

Buy a digital wallet card and gift it to your friend so they can buy the game with it instead.

It's ILLEGAL for Steam to do that.

It will not change, best to send a virtual steam gift card in the monetary amount needed for your "Friend" to purchase the game.

Originally posted by Myucel:

I recently tried to gift a game to a friend who lives in a different region, but I ran into an issue: Steam blocked the gift entirely due to regional pricing differences. I understand and respect the reasons behind this — it helps prevent people from exploiting price differences across countries.

That said, it would be really helpful if there were an option to still gift the game by paying the regional price difference upfront. For example, if the game costs more in my friend’s region, I’d be happy to pay that extra amount during checkout.

It sounds great, rational in a universe where everything is simple and straight forward. Unfortunately that's not the universe we live in.

This is one of those cases where you want to do something that seems obvious. And you're not anywhere close to the first person this month to suggest it. So one might ask, "Why didn't Valve do this really obvious thing?"

After all they put in these rules to prevent gifting over a certain threshold. Do you honestly believe they didn't consider anyone wanting to or being wiling to pay extra to gift anyway? So why didn't they do it?

Once you start looking into that, some of the challenges become more and more apparent. It's more complicated than just add $x.xx to the price. Plus the imbalance works both ways. I in the U.S. can't buy games for lots of regions even though I'm paying way more than the cost for them. And somehow subtracting $x.xx from the price, which is the very next thing someone thinks of if we're paying the difference, obviously we should be able to save the difference too.

And if I can buy games for a pittance, gets pretty easy to make a foreign account and gift a bunch of games to it.

And that's just one very obvious problem. That's not even to mention all the laws Valve has to follow.

I'm sure they looked at the options, and declined to try yours.

Laws exist to make reason seem unreasonable.