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It looks like the European Commission has turned its attention away from the tech giants of the world and now has its sights set on Valve along with five other PC game publishers. The commission is launching an antitrust investigation into Valve's business practises alongside Zenimax (Bethesda parent company), Capcom, Bandai Namco, Koch Media and Focus Home. The focus here appears to be the selective geo-blocking of certain game titles.
The Commission is looking to figure out whether or not these companies are in breach of the EU's antitrust rules by preventing consumers from accessing certain games based on region.
Here is the commission's official reasoning behind this investigation: “The investigation concerns geo-blocking practices, where companies prevent consumers from purchasing digital content, in this case PC video games, because of the consumer's location or country of residence. an “activation key” can grant access to a purchased game only to consumers in a particular EU Member State (for example the Czech Republic or Poland). This may amount to a breach of EU competition rules by reducing cross-border competition as a result of restricting so-called “parallel trade” within the Single Market and preventing consumers from buying cheaper games that may be available in other Member States.”
So it seems that the commission could potentially take issue with Valve's region-based activation keys for certain titles. There is no deadline for this investigation as things are still in the early stages and while Valve, Zenimax and other publishers could face fines, no formal charges have been placed yet.
Aside from that, the Commission is also launching two other investigations this week, one aimed at consumer electronic manufacturers and a second aimed at hotels.
KitGuru Says: It sounds like the EU doesn't like the idea of Steam locking users out of purchasing games from countries where currency may be weaker. The investigation is still in its early stages but it will be interesting to see how this turns out.
The current system is quite faulty. This should bring up a good discussion on the practice as a whole and ensure people can’t be locked out of titles not censored in certain countries.
Maybe I’m wrong but I don’t think it’s about censorship/in-game content coinciding with local laws. When you look at geo-locked activation keys the most common one you’ll see is Russia, simply because of their weaker currency one would be able to buy and activate games at a fraction of the intended price without the prevention. Obviously in the case of Russia that has nothing to do with the EU but perhaps affected countries are in the same situation
I am just guessing but wouldn’t this have something to content that might not be allowed in certain countries and it would be against the law to sell said content in that country. Example Wolfenstein series are they not blocked in Germany and can not be sold. Not sure on that mind you.
Going to miss the EU 🙁 The EC has usually given us very consumer friendly directives.
so what are they to do? Make games that adhere to ALL countries laws in order to not to have to block it anywhere? (bloody violence and nazi games would be illegal worldwide then) What then? Raise game prices in poor countries in order to allow them to use the same game codes as everyone else?
This is a no brainer for the EU. Its clearly against EU rules.
Why not just IGNORE the law and OPEN up ALL of the games to ALL the countries and then let people decide what they want to play. I play many geo-blocked games using a VPN (Switzerland doesn’t seem to have many games that have been blocked but there are a few Asian games than are not available in EU). Since I am working on my small game project, though not sure if i will finish it any time soon, but if that was to be a big game, Id distribute the game in every single country in the world, and if an x government blocks it, then i would just make a tutorial of how to access the game using a VPN, so that u could still play, without the government’s crappy blockage.
Clearly I have no morals, but that’s how I like to be. I don’t give a damn that ur country has suffered in the WW2, forget about history and just go play the game and have fun with it.