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EU Charges Valve and 5 Game Publishers With Unfair 'Geo-Blocking' (venturebeat.com)
The European Commission charged Valve, the owner of a video distribution platform, and five game publishers on Friday with preventing EU consumers from shopping around within the European Union to find the best deal for the games they offer. From a report: The case is the latest move by EU antitrust regulators against cross-border curbs on online trade, key to what is seen as a major part of economic growth in the 28-country bloc. The Commission, which oversees competition policy in the 28 EU countries, said that the companies were Valve, the owner of the world's largest video game distribution platform 'Steam', and five game makers -- Bandai Namco, Capcom, Focus Home, Koch Media and ZeniMax. "In a true digital single market, European consumers should have the right to buy and play video games of their choice regardless of where they live in the EU," European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said. The Commission has sent what it calls a "statement of objections" to the companies, allowing them to reply and request hearings to present their arguments.
Let's hope that they won't raise the poorest regions' prices up to the level of the richest regions' levels.
There are so many others out there guilty of the same beyond just games. The movie/series industries in particular. I am sick and tired of Discovery Channel's geoblocking of their online content which forces me to pirate if I want to see their content that they never released for Nirwegian audiences in the first place, specifically Mythbusters. How I would love to be proved wrong.
There are so many others out there guilty of the same beyond just games.
Netflix has no control over region availability of content that is not theirs, so you'd have to ask why they do not go after studios...
Netflix itself is awesome, because all content produced by Netflix is available in all regions. As the Netflix library expands, more and more content is world-wide, a major plus to going with Netflix instead of some dinosaur of media that insists on keeping some things to specific regions of the Earth.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Steam makes a lot of effort to stop people from buying outside the EU. But within the EU it is pretty much "change your current location in the settings, PROFIT".
A couple of years ago I bought all my steam stuff from russian, ukrain, brasilian and indian resellers for like 10-30% of the EU/US prices. This ist pretty much impossible now because those "poor country editions" have been blocked from starting for a couple of years in the EU. Though all my old stuff still works if I would buy a current game it would be geo blocked.
Nowadays I buy the british and rumanian editions. These are always working fine and without geo blocking. Although these are lot more expensive than russian/etc edition they are still less expensive than DE editions. And come uncut.
"Life is short and in most cases it ends with death." Sir Sinclair
Do they require this of petrol companies as well, or are their prices not different by location? As far as Valve goes, you can activate games not purchased on Steam, so just purchase it in the store if you don't like the price.
Also, didn't the movie industry pretty much invent geo blocking? Or was it the publishing (book) industry? Are they going after them as well?
--- Keep the choice with the user..
Wouldn't that be socialism? And isn't that what people are already complaining about so much?
Sarcasm aside, I've actually been in Romania last year, visiting my place of birth and some relatives that moved back to their homestead/farm, because they like the climate there more than in Germany.
When shopping in one of the bigger cities I noticed that German supermarket chains have sprouted all over the place there.
There They have a lot of products that are originally from western European states like Germany or France or the UK. At least some of these products appear to be produced locally to be sold for the local market. There are also some differences in the properties of the products.
For example I brought some body wash with me from Germany and saw the same product there in the shelves. Because I was interested I bought a bottle. When I looked at the prices I was already baffled. Things don't only cost more in terms of the purchasing power of Romanian people, things cost even more than the same brand at the same quantities costs in Germany for example.
Then when I was back at the farm I compared both. While the bottles looked nearly identical, besides of the printed labels (they used Romanian of course), after I opened the bottle I already noticed the different smell. Applied to my skin the gels even felt a bit different. I can't say much about the quality because of low sample size and little objective ways of comparison, although I do not expect the Romanian product to be superior here or at least proportionally better to justify the higher price.
The whole idea behind the EU is creating a single market and your example is really bad.
Does a digital delivery cost more to Romania* than Luxembourg? No. Does it cost more to operate a bistro in Luxembourg than Romania? Yes.
Are there several Steam companies competing to deliver games? No. Are there several bistros in Luxembourg (and Romania) in a competitive market? Yes.
(* I'll keep your city-to-country comparison but that's... bad)
they just enforce what the developers and publishers demand.
PSN? Xbox Live?
You're missing the point. The economies of Luxembourg and Romania are different, which is why the prices will be different. This move by the EU attempts to ignore that economic reality and pretend that someone in Romania could afford to pay the prices charged in Luxembourg. While I'm certain that the person in Luxembourg would be greatly pleased if they could pay lower prices, the bistro owner would not be able to stay in business if they were forced to charge those lower prices. Just because a digital market doesn't face the physical distribution problems of an eatery does not mean that the other economic considerations that go into pricing goods have been similarly vanished.
EU's been bitching about this for a while. Supposedly identical products being actually different (i.e. worse) and sometimes even more expensive in the EE markets is a pretty common thing.
It's still surprising that despite living like 200km from Germany, I can't buy most of the products available there, huge global brands excepted obviously.
And yes, it does let the EU do that.
I wish they'd do the same for Kobo Books...
I can only buy from the Irish store because I have an Irish credit card. I can't buy from the UK store as I don't have a UK credit card. Books are generally much much cheaper on the UK store.
I can browse the UK store, but get redirected to the Irish store when I try to buy something.
Companies selling digitally delivered goods and services in the EU are required by law to gather evidence of where they customers are located.
The sales tax (value added tax) percentages, thresholds and rules vary widely across the EU. In the Netherlands you pay VAT on the first euro of sales. In the UK you can sell the equivalent of about 75000 euros of stuff before you need to charge VAT.
VAT is supposed to be paid to the country where the buyer is located. If you sell a pdf knitting pattern to someone in Bulgaria you are supposed to get the tax sent to the government of Bulgaria.
The intention is to stop an Amazon subsidiary in Luxembourg processing all their EU sales at the lowest VAT rate. In practice it means a person who, as a tiny business, wants to sell fifty $20 software licences or pdf knitting patterns has deal with calculating VAT using 28 different sets of rules and there is a chance of being audited by the Bulgarian tax authority.
It's a bureaucratic nightmare for small businesses.
The perplexing part to me was that I could see plenty of Romanian people buying a that overpriced stuff in large quantities. Shopping carts stuffed with junk food like Chio Chips (German brand) and soft drinks like Fanta (German origin) and Coca Cola. This was in one of the Kauflands in Sibiu or like we Transylvanian Saxons are calling it - Hermannstadt.
I know that at least some of them work in Germany for a couple of months and then head back home to spend money there, while others certainly have to manage to get by on Romanian wages, which can be about as low as 300€ per month. And they still spend money on those products.
This opened my eyes to two things: It looks like we've successfully turned them into crafty consumers of our western products. And if they fully embrace the western lifestyle it's actually more affordable for them to just stay in Germany. Although I already helped a couple of families to integrate into German society over the course of the last decade, I never dared to ask for reasons to choose permanent residence here.
The definition of a free market is essentially that the forces of supply and demand determine what happens without government interference. If the EU really were a single digital market in the economic free market sense, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
The part where the EU digital single market isn't actually a free market in the economic sense, and the EU is artificially intervening through regulation to promote greater uniformity in price and availability than would otherwise be present.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Here you go. The EU already imposes extensive pricing controls. As we've been discussing elsewhere in this Slashdot story, currently there is still tolerance for differences in IP licensing in different places, but it's clear that eliminating such differences is one of the big goals of the digital single market project (though the degree to which they could legally force that issue given broader international agreements is apparently the subject of some debate).
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
The point is that the default position under copyright is that the right holder gets to control who is allowed to perform certain acts with the work, and the main effect of all the related international law is to allow the enforcement of such rights internationally. Permitting other use without the copyright holder's consent requires specific provision. For example, various countries' fair use/dealing provisions permit some use even without the copyright holder's consent and the law specifically allows for this. So, unless there is also some basis in law for regional licensing, how do you think this idea of mandatory EU-wide licences would work?
As a potentially relevant anecdote for comparison, the UK tried not long ago to adjust its law to allow uses like format shifting without requiring permission. Even that was struck down shortly afterwards because they didn't demonstrate sufficiently well that the harm to copyright holders was minimal and they weren't proposing any sort of compensation mechanism.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Well, at this point I'm pretty sure one of us doesn't really understand how copyright works, but as someone who has run businesses in this field for a long time and probably spent more money on real legal advice about these issues from real lawyers that you've earned in your entire career, I suspect it's not me. In any case, this discussion isn't going anywhere, so HAND and I think we're done here.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.