So you’ll be wondering if it is possible and how to activate Russian Steam keys? The world is a rather large place but as the internet has grown in popularity and become part of our everyday life it has also brought the world closer together, virtually making it seem small. With the click of a button we can access news, music, books or anything we desire from all corners of the world.

Those who have moved across the globe can access home comforts, like local music or art within seconds of them being uploaded half way around the world and with this virtual shrinkage comes to possibility to take advantage of different markets price points.

Steam games are cheaper in Russia

Russia and eastern European countries have always had a large piracy problem, mainly due to the fact that years ago there were no or very lax copyright laws. It wasn’t uncommon even 5-10 years ago for government institutions to also be making use of illegal copyrighted programs.

Due to such piracy problems the price of software and for the purpose of this article, games in particular, has lead to huge price variations between what most people pay in North America, Europe, Austrilasia and other locations against the price of games in Russia and CIS countries. These prices can be up to and over 50% cheaper than the price outside of Russia.

There are various retailers of Russian games based in Russia who will happily sell you them in Steam CD-Key format from official outlets such as Plati. There are also a wide range of Steam CD-Key resellers that are based all over the world like G2Play, OnlineKeyStore & CDKeyGamer, many of them sell Russian CD-Keys for Steam that require one time activation inside Russia to then be played outside.

While this process goes against the Terms & Conditions of Steam it has been a sneaky way of obtaining cheap PC games for the past few years and very few people have ever fallen fowl of the Steam T&C by following this process.

So you’ll be wondering, this is all well and good but how can I actually activate my Russian CD-Key on Steam? No doubt you’ll have already tried from your home connection and been met with the following screen… Read on and we’ll explain how to bypass this…

Steam Russian CD-Key

How to activate Russian Steam CD-Keys

When you connect to Steam on your home connection the system knows which country you’re accessing it from because of your IP address. So the solution to registering your Russian CD-Key is by fooling Steam in to thinking you’re connecting from Russia. For this to be achieved you’ll need to look in to signing up for a service called a VPN (Virtual Private Network).

A VPN allows you to connect to a third party server anywhere in the world and from there sends all of your internet data through this third party server and on to the internet. By doing so your connection then becomes that of the VPN server. In this case you need to connect to a server located in Russia or the Ukraine will also do for this purpose. Once connected any website you visit or program that you run (like Steam!) will be seeing that you’re connected from Russia (or the Ukraine) and so when you go to register your Russian CD-Key you’ll no longer be told it isn’t possible as Steam now thinks you’re in Russia or the Ukraine. Once registered you can disconnect from the VPN server.

The only downside is VPN access isn’t free but it can be extremely cheap and for the purpose of this process you can pick up the cheapest service from many providers and it will be adequate. Once thing you need to make sure of is that the VPN provider offers a Russian or Ukrainian server and for this purpose based on price we recommend you take a look at Proxy.sh who offer a $2 package which gives you 72 hour access and offers a server in the Ukraine, you’ll literally need the service for 5 minutes or less so from this perspective it is ideal. If you’re after a little longer access as you may want to register more games then take a look at a monthly service from IPVanish which by following our link will set you back $5 per month or EarthVPN which is available at $3.99 per month.

You may have heard of a Proxy or Proxies but these are not suitable for this purpose because they only allow the ability to change the location of your web browsing and not through software such as Steam so for this purpose you’ll need to make use of a VPN.

If you get stuck or have any questions then please feel free to post in the comments section and we’ll be glad to answer your queries.