European Commission Fines Valve, Capcom, and Others for € 7.8 million Over Geo-Blocking Practices

[Tsing]

Image: Valve



The European Commission has announced that it has fined Valve, Bandai Namco, Capcom, Focus Home, Koch Media, and ZeniMax for € 7.8 million after they were found to have been in violation of EU antitrust rules. More specifically, these companies engaged in the practice of geo-blocking, whereby Steam keys were configured so they could only be used/redeemed in certain countries. This business practice went against the European Union’s Digital Single Market principle, which allows customers to shop around between member states to find the best deal.



“Valve and the publishers restricted cross-border sales of certain PC video games on the basis of the geographical location of users within the European Economic Area (‘EEA’), entering into, the so called ‘geo-blocking’ practices,” a press release...

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[Armenius]

Is it not the publishers who ultimately set pricing? As far as I'm aware, Valve just pushes suggested regional pricing to the publisher when they make a game live on Steam, but they have the choice to set it to a different amount. Though Valve kind of shot themselves in the foot when they blocked the activation of keys from regions other than the account trying to activate it.

 

[MadMummy76]

Good, it's high time ****ty companies stopped discriminating based on your location. "OH we can squeeze a bit more money out of this region ,then we raise their prices by 10%" "We have an exclusive deal in this region so we are holding back on content there until our partner decides to release it" etc.

 

[Brian_B]

I can partly sympathize — currency exchange rates are very dynamic in some places, and not every country seems to want deal in a common global currency (be that BTC, USD, Yuan, whatever)

 

[GunShot]

Good, it’s high time ****ty companies stopped discriminating based on your location.

You know, that only means that everyone in those countries will have to pay the same price, even poorer countries, huh?!

And you're cool about that for just to "be equal and so-called fair!"

 

[MadMummy76]

You know, that only means that everyone in those countries will have to pay the same price, even poorer countries, huh?!

And you're cool about that for just to "be equal and so-called fair!"

Yeah that's exactly why I already pay 25-30% more for almost everything than in countries where the standard of living is 3-4x better. Fair my ***.
The only reason regional prices exist is because companies want to squeeze every large market to its breaking point. Not because of the goodness of their heart.

If they really wanted fairness they'd set prices that match the standard of living, not whims, and size of the market.

 

[Brian_B]

If they really wanted fairness they'd set prices that match the standard of living, not whims, and size of the market.

This is true. There is zero fairness involved in capitalism though.