• Steam Version: 1782533657, Steam Client Build Date: Thu, Jun 25, 2026 07:24 UTC +08:00
• Distribution: EndeavourOS + Hyprland (Under Wayland). The Steam Client itself is under native Pacman, but not flatpak.
• Opted into Steam client beta?: No
• Have you checked for system updates?: Yes
• Steam Logs: Here
• GPU: NVIDIA RTX4060 Laptop, under nvidia-smi.

Please describe your issue in as much detail as possible:

This is a follow-up/more detailed analysis of the stale issue #10131, which describes the exact same problem but lacked technical details.

As a user in mainland China having to use a VPN / Proxy to get access to like workshops or steam community, I found that the "download region" option is not always respected under specific circumstances. I'm in Shanghai, what I expect is that when I choose the download region as "China - Shanghai", Steam Client should redirect the CDN download server to the Shanghai server. However, currently this does not work at all because what I found is that the actual download CDN server is based on the login location of the user, and since my steam login is routed to Hong Kong, Steam Client, instead of following the manually chosen "download region" in Shanghai, it allocated me the HKG CDN servers, which I don't think this is reasonable.

As it's shown in the pics.

It would be incredibly helpful if you could implement either of the following:

1. Respect the manually selected "Download Region" in Settings even if the client's CM session GeoIP differs.
2. Alternatively, introduce a launch argument or a Steam console variable (e.g., -skip-cdn-geoip-override or download_region_force) to allow advanced users to strictly bypass the active CM session's IP-based geolocation and bind downloads to the selected local CDNs.