Confused on Steam Play and Proton? Be sure to check out our guide.
We do often include affiliate links to earn us some pennies. See more here.

It seems Valve and five publishers have attracted the attention of the EU, as they claim they're breaching EU competition rules. In particular, what the EU say they're doing goes against the "Regulation 2018/302" introduced on December 3rd last year.

The statement from the European Commission, available here, mentions that they've sent Statements of Objections to Valve and Bandai Namco, Capcom, Focus Home, Koch Media and ZeniMax.

The main concerns from the EU are these:

  • Valve and the five PC video game publishers agreed, in breach of EU antitrust rules, to use geo-blocked activation keys to prevent cross-border sales, including in response to unsolicited consumer requests (so-called “passive sales”) of PC video games from several Member States (i.e. Czechia, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and in some cases Romania). This may have prevented consumers from buying cheaper games available in other Member States.
  • Bandai Namco, Focus Home, Koch Media and ZeniMax, broke EU antitrust rules by including contractual export restrictions in their agreements with a number of distributors other than Valve. These distributors were prevented from selling the relevant PC video games outside the allocated territories, which could cover one or more Member States. These practices may have prevented consumers from purchasing and playing PC video games sold by these distributors either on physical media, such as DVDs or through downloads.

Valve just sent out a statement, here's what they said in full for those interested:

Earlier today, the European Commission ("EC") sent Statements of Objections ("SO") to Valve and five publishers in an investigation that it started in 2013. The EC alleges that the five publishers entered into agreements with their distributors that included geo-blocking provisions for PC games sold by the distributors, and that separately Valve entered into agreements with the same publishers that prevented consumers in the European Economic Area ("EEA") from purchasing PC games because of their location. 

However, the EC's charges do not relate to the sale of PC games on Steam - Valve's PC gaming service. Instead the EC alleges that Valve enabled geo-blocking by providing Steam activation keys and - upon the publishers' request - locking those keys to particular territories ("region locks") within the EEA.  Such keys allow a customer to activate and play a game on Steam when the user has purchased it from a third-party reseller. Valve provides Steam activation keys free of charge and does not receive any share of the purchase price when a game is sold by third-party resellers (such as a retailer or other online store). 

The region locks only applied to a small number of game titles.  Approximately just 3% of all games using Steam (and none of Valve's own games) at the time were subject to the contested region locks in the EEA. Valve believes that the EC's extension of liability to a platform provider in these circumstances is not supported by applicable law. Nonetheless, because of the EC's concerns, Valve actually turned off region locks within the EEA starting in 2015, unless those region locks were necessary for local legal requirements (such as German content laws) or geographic limits on where the Steam partner is licensed to distribute a game.  The elimination of region locks will also mean that publishers will likely raise prices in less affluent regions to avoid price arbitrage. There are no costs involved in sending activation keys from one country to another and the activation key is all a user needs to activate and play a PC game.

Basically, the EU wants to prevent stores and publishers from making it so that you can't get your games cheaper if you choose to shop in a different country. It can be a pretty difficult topic, certainly one with a lot of complications. The issue gets complicated, since publishers may want to offer certain countries a cheaper price if their wages are traditionally lower but they might not do that if anyone is able to come along and just pay the cheaper price.

What are your thoughts on this?

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tags: Misc, Steam, Valve
18 Likes
About the author -
author picture
I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. Find me on Mastodon.
See more from me
The comments on this article are closed.
60 comments
Page: «3/6»
  Go to:

Julius Apr 5, 2019
However, we are talking about positive price discrimination towards poorer countries here... almost like development aid for poor gamers ;)
And it is not really evil companies price discriminating against rich countries, but rather an attempt by them to cut down on key "smuggling", which you would probably also want if you would lets say buy & donate cloths to a poor country, just for some not so poor people to take those cloth and sell them in your own country for a slightly lower price than what you bought it for.

Anyways, its unrealistic to believe such "anti-discriminatory" EU regulation will result in anything but higher prices in those poorer places and ultimately also higher prices for everyone as overall less units are sold.

Edit: I think the EU is a great idea, but run by economic idiots. The last guy who actually knew what he was doing was Yanis Varoufakis :( (who btw worked as an economist with Valve for some time!)


Last edited by Julius on 5 April 2019 at 9:21 pm UTC
F.Ultra Apr 5, 2019
View PC info
  • Supporter
Quoting: Purple Library Guy
Quoting: KithopGeo-blocking is BS, so for once the EU is in the right of it with their demands.

In Canada, the price for a game is the same across the country, whether you're in Ontario or the Yukon (barring GST/PST/HST differences, similar to VAT).

In the US, same deal - it doesn't matter what state you're in, the price of a game is the price of that game.

The article lists some EU member states in the Eurozone and some that aren't - sure, the requirement for currency exchange tends to mean there are winners and losers on the price difference... but isn't the point of the EU the whole 'single market' thing? So set the price of a game in Euro, let non-Eurozone-but-still-EU members buy it for whatever that converts to in their local currency, and otherwise treat the EU as a single 'country'.
But the EU isn't a single country. It does not act fiscally, budgetarily, or in terms of many regulations, like a single country. It does not have EU-wide public pension plans paying the same amount across the region, it does not have EU-wide minimum wage laws, it does not have EU-wide unemployment insurance, it does not have payments moving between wealthier and poorer states to try to equalize their economic situation (if anything the reverse--it has EU-mandated rules redistributing the wealth of poorer states to the banks of richer ones). In the absence of these sorts of fiscal provisions to pull the economy of the region together, the Euro actually tends to broaden economic disparities in the Eurozone by worsening the economies of the poorer states, because it deprives them of a lot of fiscal tools needed more by the poorer states that go with control over one's own currency. Like devaluation to encourage exports, and stuff.

I'm not sure of my position on this, but using actual countries as an analogy to the EU is a poor argument for whichever side and as a side effect leads to a misunderstanding of the nature of the EU.

The EU is not a single country but the whole idea behind the EU is to create a single market, and that is the whole crux here. If you sell items in one EU country then you cannot deny the purchaser from reselling that item in another EU country since the whole of EU is one large single market.

This is not about prohibiting Valve from having different prices in different EU countries, this is to prevent geo-locking on cross-border resells, nothing more, nothing less.
Arten Apr 5, 2019
Quoting: KimyriellePeople that defend that disgusting corporate practice of having no problem with moving your jobs to cheaper regions, but charging you prices as if the thing had been made in a high-wage country fail to understand that for the practice of trade the EU -is- one nation already. Goods, money, ideas and people can move absolutely freely inside the EU and did so for decades, so banning regional price discrimination is just a logical step. Nothing more, nothing less. Our our side of the pond, we don't allow corporations to block someone living in Texas from shopping in North Dakota either. Same thing.

Capitalism is most efficient method of controlling resources. There is nothing disgusting in regional prices. Sorry but my country has been in comunist hell before and EU going right to that direction and this is one of many example of that. If there is no difference between prices in high-wage country and low-wage country, how you balance wealth of citizens? If citizens of low-wage country must pay high-wage country prices, how they can make savings? How without savings they can fund businesses? How they can get richer? Or you like to create master race from high-wage country citizens and from low-wage country citizen slave race?
Julius Apr 5, 2019
Quoting: F.UltraThe EU is not a single country but the whole idea behind the EU is to create a single market, and that is the whole crux here. If you sell items in one EU country then you cannot deny the purchaser from reselling that item in another EU country since the whole of EU is one large single market.

This is not about prohibiting Valve from having different prices in different EU countries, this is to prevent geo-locking on cross-border resells, nothing more, nothing less.

Exactly, but this is one of the cases where a digital economy doesn't quite work as the regular physical goods/items one.

Being allowed to freely resell cross-border will lead game companies to abolish (lower) regional pricing most likely unless they find another (probably even less customer friendly) way to prevent large scale key "smuggling".


Last edited by Julius on 5 April 2019 at 9:30 pm UTC
Purple Library Guy Apr 5, 2019
Quoting: KimyrielleThe EU is in that fuzzy "not yet a nation, but not individual states anymore either" state. It's written goal actually IS full confederation one day. It's taking a while, because there are too many dumbass nationalists around that don't understand the "the sum is greater than its parts" thing.

People that defend that disgusting corporate practice of having no problem with moving your jobs to cheaper regions, but charging you prices as if the thing had been made in a high-wage country fail to understand that for the practice of trade the EU -is- one nation already. Goods, money, ideas and people can move absolutely freely inside the EU and did so for decades, so banning regional price discrimination is just a logical step. Nothing more, nothing less. Our our side of the pond, we don't allow corporations to block someone living in Texas from shopping in North Dakota either. Same thing.
The EU does some good things. It acts as a really effective standards body, which can be annoying to some but is probably on balance a significant positive. And the standardization on the Euro does reduce certain costs and frictions.
But it seems to me that there are big economic problems around the Euro and the way it is administered. Well, problems to most, and particularly some of the poorer countries--advantages to bankers, particularly German ones. Look how much they squalled when Iceland refused to take on its banks' private debts when they went under! EU policy on deficits, for instance, is basically designed to worsen economic downturns. And it's very hard to reform such policies because the main EU institutions are completely undemocratic; the parliament has relatively little power. It's also very bad for a country's economy not to be able to print money, devalue its currency and otherwise control its economy. The EU seems to be generally dedicated to the gradual destruction of the European welfare states in the countries that have them, and to making it impossible to establish them in the countries that don't. The administration of the EU is not, in short, politically neutral--rather, it is neoliberal and austerity oriented.
I suspect that progress towards the EU becoming a genuine country is and will remain something of a mirage. There will be movements to tie the countries closer together in some ways, but most of the things that could make it a genuine country run counter to the policy imperatives of the EU. They're more into privatizing than nation-building.
F.Ultra Apr 5, 2019
View PC info
  • Supporter
Quoting: Julius
Quoting: F.UltraThe EU is not a single country but the whole idea behind the EU is to create a single market, and that is the whole crux here. If you sell items in one EU country then you cannot deny the purchaser from reselling that item in another EU country since the whole of EU is one large single market.

This is not about prohibiting Valve from having different prices in different EU countries, this is to prevent geo-locking on cross-border resells, nothing more, nothing less.

Exactly, but this is one of the cases where a digital economy doesn't quite work as the regular physical goods/items one.

Being allowed to freely resell cross-border will lead game companies to abolish (lower) regional pricing most likely unless they find another (probably even less customer friendly) way to prevent large scale key "smuggling".

Yes this is a consequence of the producers simply putting activation keys inside the physical copies thus virtually creating a physical product that is no longer physical. The regulation in itself does not apply to pure downloads so if Valve and the 5 other companies can successfully argue that these physical boxes should be seen as pure downloads then they might have a case here.

Remember that today's press-release by the EU is not a decision to fine these companies, it's just the EU giving notice of their preliminary findings so that the involved companies can give their replies. The first real response will not be given by the EU until 23 March 2020.
F.Ultra Apr 5, 2019
View PC info
  • Supporter
Quoting: Julius
Quoting: F.UltraThe EU is not a single country but the whole idea behind the EU is to create a single market, and that is the whole crux here. If you sell items in one EU country then you cannot deny the purchaser from reselling that item in another EU country since the whole of EU is one large single market.

This is not about prohibiting Valve from having different prices in different EU countries, this is to prevent geo-locking on cross-border resells, nothing more, nothing less.

Exactly, but this is one of the cases where a digital economy doesn't quite work as the regular physical goods/items one.

Being allowed to freely resell cross-border will lead game companies to abolish (lower) regional pricing most likely unless they find another (probably even less customer friendly) way to prevent large scale key "smuggling".

Btw found this little tidbit from a earlier release in 2016:

QuoteIf geo-blocking is the result of agreements between suppliers and distributors it may restrict competition in the Single Market in breach of EU antitrust rules. Any competition enforcement measure against geo-blocking would have to be based on a case-by-case assessment, which would also include an analysis of potential justifications for restrictions that have been identified.

So the main problem can be that Valve and these 5 companies have colluded to introduce geo-blocking, and not that Valve in itself enforces geo-blocking of activation keys.
Purple Library Guy Apr 5, 2019
Quoting: F.Ultra
Quoting: Purple Library Guy
Quoting: KithopGeo-blocking is BS, so for once the EU is in the right of it with their demands.

In Canada, the price for a game is the same across the country, whether you're in Ontario or the Yukon (barring GST/PST/HST differences, similar to VAT).

In the US, same deal - it doesn't matter what state you're in, the price of a game is the price of that game.

The article lists some EU member states in the Eurozone and some that aren't - sure, the requirement for currency exchange tends to mean there are winners and losers on the price difference... but isn't the point of the EU the whole 'single market' thing? So set the price of a game in Euro, let non-Eurozone-but-still-EU members buy it for whatever that converts to in their local currency, and otherwise treat the EU as a single 'country'.
But the EU isn't a single country. It does not act fiscally, budgetarily, or in terms of many regulations, like a single country. It does not have EU-wide public pension plans paying the same amount across the region, it does not have EU-wide minimum wage laws, it does not have EU-wide unemployment insurance, it does not have payments moving between wealthier and poorer states to try to equalize their economic situation (if anything the reverse--it has EU-mandated rules redistributing the wealth of poorer states to the banks of richer ones). In the absence of these sorts of fiscal provisions to pull the economy of the region together, the Euro actually tends to broaden economic disparities in the Eurozone by worsening the economies of the poorer states, because it deprives them of a lot of fiscal tools needed more by the poorer states that go with control over one's own currency. Like devaluation to encourage exports, and stuff.

I'm not sure of my position on this, but using actual countries as an analogy to the EU is a poor argument for whichever side and as a side effect leads to a misunderstanding of the nature of the EU.

The EU is not a single country but the whole idea behind the EU is to create a single market, and that is the whole crux here. If you sell items in one EU country then you cannot deny the purchaser from reselling that item in another EU country since the whole of EU is one large single market.

This is not about prohibiting Valve from having different prices in different EU countries, this is to prevent geo-locking on cross-border resells, nothing more, nothing less.
That's the kind of reason denying the EU is, or is very much like, a country did not lead me to certainty about what policy is right for this situation.
Julius Apr 5, 2019
Quoting: F.UltraSo the main problem can be that Valve and these 5 companies have colluded to introduce geo-blocking, and not that Valve in itself enforces geo-blocking of activation keys.

Yeah, that is an interesting part of it, but if I understood correctly we are talking about Steam activation keys, so how could they not have discussed with the Valve beforehand? Again, I think this is someone trying to apply rules for physical goods to digital ones, but you are of course right that this conclusion might very well also be the outcome of this EU investigation.
F.Ultra Apr 5, 2019
View PC info
  • Supporter
Quoting: Purple Library Guy
Quoting: KimyrielleThe EU is in that fuzzy "not yet a nation, but not individual states anymore either" state. It's written goal actually IS full confederation one day. It's taking a while, because there are too many dumbass nationalists around that don't understand the "the sum is greater than its parts" thing.

People that defend that disgusting corporate practice of having no problem with moving your jobs to cheaper regions, but charging you prices as if the thing had been made in a high-wage country fail to understand that for the practice of trade the EU -is- one nation already. Goods, money, ideas and people can move absolutely freely inside the EU and did so for decades, so banning regional price discrimination is just a logical step. Nothing more, nothing less. Our our side of the pond, we don't allow corporations to block someone living in Texas from shopping in North Dakota either. Same thing.
The EU does some good things. It acts as a really effective standards body, which can be annoying to some but is probably on balance a significant positive. And the standardization on the Euro does reduce certain costs and frictions.
But it seems to me that there are big economic problems around the Euro and the way it is administered. Well, problems to most, and particularly some of the poorer countries--advantages to bankers, particularly German ones. Look how much they squalled when Iceland refused to take on its banks' private debts when they went under! EU policy on deficits, for instance, is basically designed to worsen economic downturns. And it's very hard to reform such policies because the main EU institutions are completely undemocratic; the parliament has relatively little power. It's also very bad for a country's economy not to be able to print money, devalue its currency and otherwise control its economy. The EU seems to be generally dedicated to the gradual destruction of the European welfare states in the countries that have them, and to making it impossible to establish them in the countries that don't. The administration of the EU is not, in short, politically neutral--rather, it is neoliberal and austerity oriented.
I suspect that progress towards the EU becoming a genuine country is and will remain something of a mirage. There will be movements to tie the countries closer together in some ways, but most of the things that could make it a genuine country run counter to the policy imperatives of the EU. They're more into privatizing than nation-building.

Now you are spreading the myth that EU is undemocratic which is blatantly false.

The EU Comission consists of people assigned by the government of each member state, so by definition fully democratic since they are appointed by the government that we the EU citizens have voted for in our national elections.
The EU Council consists of the heads of state of each member state, so people that we EU citizens vote on in our national elections.
The EU parliament consists of people that we as EU citizens vote on in the EU elections, again fully democratic.
While you're here, please consider supporting GamingOnLinux on:

Reward Tiers: Patreon. Plain Donations: PayPal.

This ensures all of our main content remains totally free for everyone! Patreon supporters can also remove all adverts and sponsors! Supporting us helps bring good, fresh content. Without your continued support, we simply could not continue!

You can find even more ways to support us on this dedicated page any time. If you already are, thank you!
The comments on this article are closed.