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Valve and Game Publishers Face EU Probe For Geo-Blocking; ASUS Faces Probe For Online Price-Fixing (betanews.com)
Valve, the company behind games distribution platform Steam, is being investigated by EU antitrust regulators. Agreements in place between Valve and five game publishers that implement geo-blocking in titles could breach European competition rules. From a BetaNews report: Valve, alongside Bandai Namco, Capcom, Focus Home, Koch Media and ZeniMax, is under investigation to determine whether the practice of restricting access to games and prices based on location is legal. At the same time the European Commission is launching an investigation into ASUS, Denon & Marantz, Philips and Pioneer for price manipulation. The investigation into the four electronics manufacturers centers around the fact that the companies restricted the ability of online retailers to set their own pricing for goods.
They will run into issues where Steam is working around various censorship laws in specific European countries. Hopefully they can get away with just removing restrictions of the stores without having to have it comply with being local stores in each county.
World-wide releases are 100% possible now. There isn't a ridiculous overhead cost to doing it like there is with physical media.
There is still an overhead cost for two reasons:
1. Language barriers. To make something practically exclusive to Japan, require fluency in the Japanese language for its use, and use technical and legal means to block fans from making and using infringing fan translations.
2. Countries still don't trust other countries' age rating boards.