Humble Bundle is having a promotion on their Humble Monthly Yearly subscriptions, get 12 months for the price of 10, $119.

Some other games that will be removed from Steam:

Earthlock - will be replaced with a new version, previous owners will get the new one for free

The Legends of Owlia - a free ROM is being offered

Clickr - developer is going to a different platform

^Thr first of those games looks interesting, but the other two...

Still, it's a shame that they're removing them from the store.

Contest!

+HEXUS EPIC Giveaway Day 13: Win one of five Crucial BX300 480GB SSDs http://hexus.net/tech/features/storage/113012-day-13-win-crucial-bx300-480gb-ssd/
It may come in handy if you plan to get Star Citizen >.<!

Even more Contests:

+HEXUS EPIC Giveaway Day 14: Win a be quiet! upgrade bundle http://hexus.net/tech/features/cooling/113015-day-14-win-quiet-upgrade-bundle/
It consists on a Dark Base 700 case, a Dark Power Pro 11 850W PSU and a Silent Loop 280 liquid cooler.

Good Morning and Merry Christmas / Happy Holidays to all of you. Let's go with a contest:

+Guru3D 2017 December 25 contest: Win a MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Ti DUKE 11G OC http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/guru3d-2017-december-25-contest-win-a-msi-geforce-gtx-1080-ti-duke-11g-oc.html
And just because it's X-mas the answer is the Fractal Design Define R6 review, page 11, 5th photo (if you want to double check it)

More competitions!

+Guru3D 2017 December 26 contest: Win a GeForce GTX 1080 Founders edition http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/guru3d-2017-december-26-contest-win-a-geforce-gtx-1080-founders-edition.html

+HEXUS EPIC Giveaway Day 15: Win a Stormforce Gaming PC http://hexus.net/tech/features/systems/113018-day-15-win-stormforce-gaming-pc/
The specs are: Cooler Master Masterbox Lite 5 RGB chassis, liquid-cooled Intel Core i5-8600K CPU, Asus Z370 TUF Plus motherboard, Asus GeForce GTX 1080 Turbo graphics card, 16GB Kingston HyperX Fury DDR4-2400 memory, WD Black M.2 PCIe 256GB SSD, WD 2TB hard drive and FSP 500W PSU.

+HEXUS EPIC Giveaway Day 16: Win one of five WD Blue 1TB hard drives http://hexus.net/tech/features/storage/113021-day-16-win-one-five-wd-blue-1tb-hard-drives/

Also, I want to remind you that today there won't be news. They will come back tomorrow.

By now I'm convinced that the GPU price hike this year wasn't because of mining but people hoarding hardware for Christmas giveaways.

What I don't know is if that hardware is retail units or review samples that are now giving away.

I lean more for the second option.

You know, this Christmas has been made difficult when it came to gifting people from around the world games on Steam.

Thanks to the shitty regional pricing block, I couldn't gift many people from the US, let alone countries outside or inside of the EU.

Now while we can chalk that up as a bad thing for Valve, hows about GoG and the rest of those clients not having those games on there, the ones I wanted to gift to those that wanted them. If the competition actually had a spine, they'd all have the same games within their storefronts, and those who think region gift blocks are a good idea, can suffer and lose out.

GOG is trying. Most indie games appear on their store at the same time or shortly after launching on Steam, excpet for the garbage ones that remain Steam exclusive.

Now it's only a matter of big publishers losing their fear and embracing GOG too, but it will take time.

As for the region lock... well, "we" are part of the problem. If "we" hadn't gone to those russian, to name one of the problematic regions, sites that sold Steam keys for less than half its price in Euros or Dollars, then maybe we wouldn't face this problem now. It's the same as the daily sales of the old Winter and Summer Sales, if people hadn't abused the system, asking for a refund of the game they just bought a day earlier because now it was featured in one of those flash sales with a bigger discount, then Valve wouldn't have changed now. But no, "we" had to be smart and clever, and in the end it came back and bite us in the back, with our pants down.

That said, I agree that Valve has overdone with those regions. I'm surprised you, Chazore, can be affected so much for this given that you're UK region.