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Valve and Game Publishers Face EU Probe For Geo-Blocking; ASUS Faces Probe For Online Price-Fixing (betanews.com)

Posted by msmash on from the enough-already dept.

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.

3 of 74 comments (clear)

  1. Movies? by Scarred+Intellect · · Score: 4, Interesting
    From TFA:

    Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said: "E-commerce should give consumers a wider choice of goods and services, as well as the opportunity to make purchases across borders. The three investigations we have opened today focus on practices where we suspect companies are trying to deny these benefits for consumers."

    So the MPAA, Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, et al. can geoblock, but video game publishers/distributors can't?

    I suppose that makes sense. Or something.

    1. Re:Movies? by Orphis · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Or Sony and Apple too, for which their application store is geoblocked.

      In an age where people move freely in Europe, your account for those is locked to one country and you can't really change it easily.

      My French PSN account subscription couldn't be renewed using my Swedish credit card. I managed to find a proper online video game store that would just sell serial codes for the PSN and accept my Swedish credit card. I effectively worked around their limitations, but it was very annoying.

      And then, my French Apple account could be "moved" to Sweden, but I would have to "buy" everything again (then it would discover I already had a license for some content and not bill me). That's not ok either, as some apps where actually different versions and it did bill me for some. I paid twice for the same thing because of virtual borders online within EU.

  2. Re:Good though difficult by tepples · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Citizens of EU member states still owe use tax when buying services from outside the EU. Unfortunately, the EU's page about this doesn't mention how citizens are supposed to pay VAT for imported services.