Quoting: ArtenSo, you propouse use regulation (forcing valve enable regional pricing) for deal with consequences of another regulation?

You are shifting the blame here.
The consequences of not allowing region blocking should not be that there is only one EU region. Imagine if that was the case for other goods - EU would have imploded the moment that happened.
That this was the result is entirely Valve's fault - they could have, and easily so, only removed the region locking without also removing different EU regions (remember, they had those, even if only three).
They did not do that out of good old corporate greed - capitalistic entities will always strive to maximize profit, no matter the negative consequences. Which a state (or in this case, the EU) exists to regulate in order to benefit its citizens. It's called social capitalism and is working fairly well in most European countries.
It requires regulations, believe it or not.

Now, what can the EU do here?
Abolish its own principles because one fringe entity (in the grand scheme of things, when talking about the entire EU, Valve doesn't amount to anything) chose to be greedy about implementing laws?
I'd hope not - if they did that, it would show that just about anyone could strongarm the EU into backpedaling.
Force Valve to not f*ck over its customers? That would be optimal but as I said, I have no clue if there is legal ground to enforce regional pricing.
Or just do nothing and accept being blamed for another's fault? Unfortunately the most likely scenario here, there are bigger tasks to tackle right now for the EU than Valve.

Quoting: ArtenAnother regulation only do situaction worst in another place!

Not the one that I proposed, at least not for customers.
As I wrote before, regional pricing has not lead to price increases so far - just look at Russian games that aren't region locked, there is no price increase on the scale some seem to be afraid of.
Assuming that this would somehow be different for the EU is just fear mongering without a base in reality.

It would lead to Valve and publishers earning less money per purchase in lower income regions - while also leading to a lot more purchases in these regions. I'm not even sure it would lead to a net loss. I could very well imagine lots of people from lower income regions purchasing a lot more after such a change.

Besides, seriously, what is the worst that could happen?
We already ARE in the worst case for most Steam customers in the EU! Everyone's paying the highest price. Having regional prices again would mean an improvement for pretty much everyone.
Even in the (highly unlikely) case that those regional prices would be rising - they'd still be lower for most than they are now.

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Quoting: WindousicoConsequently, regional pricing was terminated with the elimination of region locks on Steam (something I regretted greatly).

Indeed, it was.
Which is absolutely a mistake - I'm not sure what really went wrong there.
It was definitely not the EU demanding regional pricing to be stopped within the EU.

My guess is that Valve itself realized that regional pricing within the EU would lose it some income without region locking and therefore decided to just have one Euro region at the highest price and be done with it.
Also enabling the EU to become the scapegoat again. You kinda feel bad for EU politicians - meaning well, often doing good, but almost always failing to foresee consequences of their actions.

What the EU should actually do now is force Valve to enable regional pricing within the EU again. But I doubt there is legal grounds for that. And apparently the prices even for the lower income region are still "low" enough to make enough sales.

In the end, just another example of Valve's greed - right in line with the ridiculous 30% cut.
And no, I'm not a hater, I just see the good and the bad an entity like Valve is doing.

Quoting: WindousicoThere is no "existing" problem. There is a "verdict" 6 years later (more or less).

Yes, thanks.
I reread the article and now I get it, too. This is the resolution of the problem from back then.

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Quoting: x_wingthere is a chance that a third party can exploit this backdoor and create a business around it that will definitely simplify the steps that a user has to follow in order to get their games for cheaper.

That is true, but not a new problem at all.
So far Steam has failed to tackle the problem of key resellers.
Still, even with all the key reselling, it seems to only be a smaller problem for developers and Steam as most people simply continue to purchase via Steam (or legitimate stores like Humble or gamersgate) for the most part as it is the most convenient.

Quoting: x_wingIMO it's always better to keep things as simple as possible. So, maybe the rule should have been that if you get a key that you cannot activate in your country, the seller is obligated to refund your money

That would still be illegal within the EU as it is effectively region locking.
The best solution would be as I wrote above, allow different pricing regions per country instead of per currency.

The fear that this would lead to price explosions for the lower income markets simply has not come true for any kind of digital purchase that I am aware of (and I'm aware of a few).
E.g. non-region locked games from Russia, despite key resellers, have not caused a price explosion for Russian gamers. Nor am I aware of such price increases before there even was region locking - Valve introduced that because it was missing out on a bit of income and possibly due to national law demands.

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Quoting: WindousicoRegional pricing was terminated with the elimination of region locks. It's a fact in Steam. Now we have the same prices in Poland, Spain and Germany (since 2015-2016).

This is clearly not true for Poland, as anyone can check.

However, it seems true that Steam only allows setting prices per currency, not per region. At least I couldn't find price differences within EU countries in my VPN search across different Steam fronts.
Basically, all Euro countries pay the same price - this does, indeed prevent regional pricing within Euro countries.
Which is really ridiculous as the disposable income within Euro countries is vastly different.

It seems like Valve basically took the EU's complaint about illegal regional locking and used that as a reason to not even have different regions within a single currency - they used to have that at least somewhat with their EU tiers, but they abandoned even that minimal effort.

As an annoying side effect, as all can witness in this thread, the wrong idea got into people's heads that the EU would want to ban regional price differences - even saw that in some articles.

Sucks for residents of affected countries.
Either way, that's not the EU's fault (as the EU only prohibits regional locking, not pricing), and in this case it's not even the publishers' fault - this is on Valve not caring about lower GDP regions within the EU.
All they'd need to do is to allow different regional pricing within countries with the same currency while also not allowing regional locking.

What I don't understand is what all the fuss is about, then. If Valve removed the region locking in 2015 already and there are no regional price differences within Euro countries - what's the actual problem now?
The remaining few EU countries that don't have Euro being region locked?

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Quoting: Arten

Quoting: TheSHEEEPThe amount of made-up-fact posts in this thread is pretty ridiculous.

Quoting: mphuZThis is NOT about regional pricing, it is about region locking within the EU.

Regional pricing is not only legal, it is perfectly normal - you pay different prices for the same thing in different countries - the EU is no exception. I've been in seven countries within the EU (not counting airport stops) and went shopping (groceries, etc.) in all of them, and almost ALL prices differ from country to country.

If i remember correctly there are different rules for physical goods and purely digital. So, you compare apples with oranges.

There are different rules, but those are mostly tax related. Unfortunately, I had the "pleasure" of having to dive into EU tax laws for trading and the many differences between physical and digital goods/services.
This gave me a headache (seriously, VAT rules are bonkers), but while doing that it also became clear that regional pricing is not a problem (including digital goods).

What is a problem is regional discrimination: https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/shopping/pricing-payments/index_en.htm#shortcut-4 [External Link]
tl;dr: You cannot charge someone more or less in your local store (e.g. Polish Steam front) if they come from a different country (e.g. Sweden). In other words, if you went to the trouble of going to the Steam front of a different EU country, you cannot be charged more and most definitely cannot be prevented from playing in your own country.

Quoting: mphuZDo you understand that one thing leads to another? No?

I understand that one thing does not lead to another. Didn't happen when large-scale geo-blocking was still a thing, and didn't happen since it isn't anymore.
People are - more than anything - lazy. The effort of going through a VPN or something similar to access a different storefront is already beyond the vast majority of people.
That laziness (and the same unreasonable fear) is also the reason a few devs/publishers don't set up regional prices - you want to blame those, not the few people who go the extra mile to save some money.

A bigger problem are illegitimate key resellers, since they are easy to access for everyone and some people don't care that developers don't get any money from sales on these platforms. But that's a very different topic.

Quoting: x_wingI really fail to see how forcing that the activation of a key on every country of the EU will not translate in the same rule for anyone that wants to buy a game using a VPN and a foreign credit card.

Thankfully, that fear has been proven wrong over the last decade and if you look at the store, somewhat varying prices within the EU are normal (for devs/publishers that bother to set them up to begin with, which some don't).
Laziness / convenience trumps everything - as long as Steam does not on its own and automatically offer you the cheapest price you could legally get, such a scenario won't happen.

Quoting: mphuZBut this geo-blocking is aimed at freeloaders who want to get games for 10% of the price in their region.

Those of us within the EU who know how to make a deal...

It is because of people like you that geo-blocking was created.

Seems to me you're envious of people who know at least somewhat how to make the most out of their money and are not afraid of going an extra step for that. You should always go where you are treated best - and so should your money.
Honestly, when it comes to games, even I don't do that - games are simply too cheap (and on sale often anyway) for me to bother. I was mostly talking about larger purchases when it concerns myself, e.g. I got my electric standing desk from a different country as I found a store there where I "only" had to pay 400€ instead of 700€ (incl. delivery).

Also, could you please point me to the mythical EU country that has 10% of another EU country's pricing? Sounds useful.

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The amount of made-up-fact posts in this thread is pretty ridiculous.

Quoting: mphuZOf course. When the EU decided on price tags, all prices were adjusted not for poor Estonia, but for rich Germany and France. Common sense has lost again.

Quite frankly, you should feel very ashamed for spreading BS like that. That is exactly how fake news start.
A good rule: if you don't know what you are talking about, don't talk about it. At least look up some official information before embarrassing yourself like that.

This is NOT about regional pricing, it is about region locking within the EU.
Regional pricing is not only legal, it is perfectly normal - you pay different prices for the same thing in different countries - the EU is no exception. I've been in seven countries within the EU (not counting airport stops) and went shopping (groceries, etc.) in all of them, and almost ALL prices differ from country to country.

Those of us within the EU who know how to make a deal generally try to order stuff from outside our national borders (but still within the EU so no customs apply, etc.) if you can save money that way.
Problem is that many national stores don't offer an international shop front to begin with - so you gotta awkwardly go through Google translate to order sth in France if you, like me, don't speak French.

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One of the survival games I'm most looking forward to.
Still holding out for "final" release, though.

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Sounds interesting.
I'm not quite sure how the online component is going to work, though.

That you can do co-op within a farm seems clear, but that part about auctioning your products to other players?
Makes it sound like you are in an MMO-like world.

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Quoting: Klaus

Quoting: TheSHEEEPObviously, if there is a security component (e.g. servers for multiplayer or MMO games), it is probably unwise to open up code, as it will make it much easier to find exploits.

Conventional wisdom is rather that open-sourcing leads to safer, not more easily attacked, code. Not sure though how this translates to MMO servers; It is usually stated in the context of trusting the security of a platform in terms of correctly used encryption etc.

For third partly libraries, certainly.
Something like OpenSSH greatly benefits from being open source.
But that is because the people using it have an increased interest in its continued improvement.

If you open sourced some (in-use!) MMO server code, you'd be pretty much the only user.
And the only people with any real interest in the code would be those looking at it for various reasons (including finding exploits that they won't disclose).
I don't know who would even have an interest in improving server source code of a running MMO beyond the extremely small cross-section of heavy users that can code and have the time and interest to code on that particular thing.

You might get lucky to catch the interest of some capable being who reports some security issues.
You might get unlucky to catch the interest of some capable being who absuses some security issues.
Not a decision I'd make if I ran the business.

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It is also a somewhat different case here as the game's development is basically done, the game has been out for many years.
Doesn't mean it can't be patched and developed further, of course.

But it's still a different beast than something like KeeperRL and Mindustry.

Generally speaking, I think open sourcing your game is advantageous, but there are exceptions:

I wouldn't do it if there were parts of a game that in themselves posess monetary value - e.g. the creator of Dwarf Fortress has wisely not opened the source code (instead that will happen once he dies) as he knows very well the world creation algorithm alone would probably be worth a lot of money to some people.
That's not a very common problem, though, I think most games "just" combine known pieces in new ways.

Obviously, if there is a security component (e.g. servers for multiplayer or MMO games), it is probably unwise to open up code, as it will make it much easier to find exploits.

By now I think the myth that people will no longer buy a game when they can "just build it themselves" has been debunked - most people just don't have the required knowledge for that. If building a game ever became a thing as easy as opening a PDF, this might change, though.
Anyway, despite not being true, I think many devs still believe it is.

I also wouldn't do it if I thought the code was trash and opening it up would embarass me - honestly I think this might be the primary reason a lot of developers don't do it even if the other reasons don't hold true for them.
Personally, I think that most code is badly written anyway so it doesn't make much of a difference if some of my own is badly written as well :whistle:

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