For a lot of games, especially games with low budgets that don’t make physical distribution possible (most indies on PC), they’re reliant on digital distribution, and Steam is the place for the majority of PC gamers to obtain their library. Also generally speaking for PC, physical distribution (apart from pirated files and niche scenarios), is basically already dead.
As for the regional pricing issue, Steam/Valve already looks at IP and regional activity (say a NA user temporarily VPN’s into Ukraine for a cheap price and then kills the VPN and plays from an NA ip afterwards) to flag accounts and restrict them from purchasing games in the future or gifting them to others. Because of that, I don’t think an increased volume of gift cards would be the issue (stolen credit cards are far more of a headache for Valve).
For a lot of games, especially games with low budgets that don’t make physical distribution possible (most indies on PC), they’re reliant on digital distribution, and Steam is the place for the majority of PC gamers to obtain their library. Also generally speaking for PC, physical distribution (apart from pirated files and niche scenarios), is basically already dead.
As for the regional pricing issue, Steam/Valve already looks at IP and regional activity (say a NA user temporarily VPN’s into Ukraine for a cheap price and then kills the VPN and plays from an NA ip afterwards) to flag accounts and restrict them from purchasing games in the future or gifting them to others. Because of that, I don’t think an increased volume of gift cards would be the issue (stolen credit cards are far more of a headache for Valve).