Valve fails to get out of paying its EU geo-blocking fine::Valve has failed to convince a court that it didn’t infringe EU law by geo-blocking activation keys, according to a new ruling.
Valve fails to get out of paying its EU geo-blocking fine::Valve has failed to convince a court that it didn’t infringe EU law by geo-blocking activation keys, according to a new ruling.
Localised pricing is good though? Is it really fair ask someone in India to pay the same price as an American? If you can’t geo block keys, you can’t stop people taking advantage by using a VPN to buy games from whatever country got the lowest price. The result will just be publishers keeping the high price for every country, screwing poorer regions over.
Also, what they did wouldn’t really qualify as price fixing.
Did you read the article? This isn’t comparable to your India vs America example, it’s specific to prices only within the EU where the EU has digital market rules that specifically prohibit this.
What Valve did does sound like price-fixing too according to your linked definition of “an agreement among competitors to [fix] price levels”:
“Valve and five publishers (Bandai Namco, Capcom, Focus Home, Koch Media and ZeniMax) agreed to use geo-blocking so that activation keys sold in some countries … would not work in other member states. That would prevent someone … buying a cheaper key … where prices are lower.”
Yes I did read it. I was pointing out that all this will do is screw over citizens of poorer EU countries. India vs USA was simply to make it obvious why the concept of geo blocking makes sense. Germans will on average have stronger buying power than someone in Latvia.
Steam is a storefront, not a competitor to game publisher. It’s effectively no different than Lidl agreeing to run a regional rebate program for Samsung TVs in Latvia for whatever reason.
The geo blocking enabled cheaper prices for certain countries, not higher. The only people who would have an issue with it is people from richer countries that for some reason are jealous of lower prices in some countries.