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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.

9 of 74 comments (clear)

  1. Good though difficult by Carewolf · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Good though difficult by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      Steam is working around issues where they sell games for next to nothing in dirt poor countries because some money is better than no money. Their troubles are reseller sites buying thousands of copies in Russia or whatever and reselling them to the west. Still half price for the westerner, shady middle man gets 14$ total profit and steam gets a buck instead of 60.

      They give no shits about censorship outside of what they legally need to comply with.

    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.

    3. Re:Good though difficult by tepples · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Steam is a service provided through the Internet. How is it "caught in customs"?

  2. 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:Movies? by Carewolf · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

      No they are also targeting that, and have been for a long time. They are extending the fight against geoblocking to not just include movies, but also include games. Does that make more sense to you?

    3. Re:Movies? by tepples · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    4. Re:Movies? by tsotha · · Score: 2

      You can release something without localizing it. I don't see the harm in saying "The game comes out on such and such a date, and will be available to everyone. The Japanese version will be available on this other, later date."