EU sends Valve, 5 publishers Statements of Objections for geo-blocking PC keys - Sensationalist Headlines

European Commission The Commission's preliminary view is that Valve and the five PC video game publishers entered into bilateral agreements to prevent consumers from purchasing and using PC video games acquired elsewhere than in their country of residence (so-called “geo-blocking”). This is against EU antitrust rules. Valve and the five PC video game publishers agreed, in breach of EU antitrust rules, to use geo-blocked activation keys to prevent cross-border sales, including in response to unsolicited consumer requests (so-called “passive sales”) of PC video games from several Member States (i.e. Czechia, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and in some cases Romania). This may have prevented consumers from buying cheaper games available in other Member States. Bandai Namco, Focus Home, Koch Media and ZeniMax, broke EU antitrust rules by including contractual export restrictions in their agreements with a number of distributors other than Valve. These distributors were prevented from selling the relevant PC video games outside the allocated territories, which could cover one or more Member States. These practices may have prevented consumers from purchasing and playing PC video games sold by these distributors either on physical media, such as DVDs or through downloads.

does this mean they will finally get sued for this bullshit? https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/57917/56b82adc-ebdd-47ab-81e6-caaf168b7d80/image.png

I remember when this happened to begin with. I thought they were very public about it... I used to buy US games for my German friend, because it would give him the uncensored version - like L4D and such - even if bought through steam as a "gift". I could have sworn it had to do with that.

But won't un-blocking these sales just cause the prices on steam for these poorer countries to rise?

Tbh not so sure about Lithuania, but in Russia it's completely justified, cause the prices are much lower. I would say one solution to that is to add an ability to purchase an international version for international price.

Is this really a good thing? Without geo-blocking they can't do regional pricing effectively. Something I used to be against, but it does help sell games legitimately across countries with wealth disparity. Without geo-blocking but with regional pricing key resellers would run rampant, and that's not good either

We don't have cheaper games on steam, we pay the same price as most EU countries. Or am i missing something here?

maybe we can have an option to gift friends by using their prices?

From SteamDB: Valve's response to European Commission's demands regarding geo

It was because exchange rates are a messy thing when you're trying to establish a price for every market.

Approximately just 3% of all games using Steam (and none of Valve's own games) at the time were subject to the contested region locks in the EEA. 3% out of ~30k games is 900. This is literally every big AAA made in at least the last 10 years.

Well it's nice to see the EU at least trying to fight the consumers corner. The video games industry has enjoyed a lack of attention from this sort of thing for a while now, hopefully steps will be taken to make a farer and leveller playing field.

Russian geo-blocking in probably fine with EU law. The issue is with Schengen countries getting differing treatment.

Right, that makes sense actually. EU doesn't care about pricing or locking outside of the EEA.

Yeah the EU could give less of a shit about geo-locking Russian purchases or whatever but don't you dare not allowing a EU citizen from buying a product available for cheaper in a different Member State. Imagine if Steam purchases in the US were locked to certain states, it's basically what was going on.

I'm not 100% sure how I feel about this, feel free to chime in if I'm missing anything, but isn't this only going to screw over poorer EU countries/players and encourage grey market sales? If they are stopped from doing this then I can imagine publishers will just jack their prices up across the board so only people Western Europe can really afford to buy them and Eastern Europeans are out of luck, rather than people being able to get cheap games by getting keys from these countries.

Just because something looks pro consumer doesn't mean that it's actually reasonable or actually something that helps consumers; automatically cheering something on becsuse it claims to be pro consumer without actually thinking about the implications is kind of silly.

Games in eastern europe aren't really cheaper though, that's only a thing in russia. All new games are still 50-60 euros over here.

Don't they only region lock if the price has a certain Delta between regions?

Nope. I bought Payday 2 at the exact same price as everyone else. Some games just do it.

Games haven't been "significantly cheaper" here for a while now