going on at Red Dead Redemption 2 [External Link]. One of the best games I've played in the last years...

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyHuh, obviously trying real hard. They're not shy about threatening to crash a member country's whole economy for disobedience if it's something they care about, like making sure you worsen your recessions with austerity.

Well, it depends: if the country has decided to join the EU and respect its founding moral principles and core values just in order to access to international funding, and later to deny those same principles to its own citizens, then yes, they deserve the austerity. In particular those country whose politicians and administrators use the EU as scapegoat for their own incompetence and/or corruption.

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Quoting: minfaerTo everybody discussing the sense of regional pricing: That is still legal and all in the EU. The only thing they are no longer allowed to do is preventing people from buying their games in other EU countries by refusing key activation (aka geoblocking).

Interestingly, from the latest law that obliges online business to let people from the EU access the offers from any EU country and forbids denying a sale based on location in the EU, digital goods "audiovisual services" (I believe this includes games and movies) are exempt. Definitely movie-industry lobbying in action there.
See here [External Link]

Edit: More precise about exemption, added source.

Thank you for clarifying

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Quoting: x_wingI understand the idea of enforcing the UE as one country but is kinda difficult to understand this mindset when the same UE doesn't enforce a minimum wage for all their members.

Actually they are trying to, but the laws have to be designed and approved in each member country:
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_20_1968 [External Link]

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Quoting: randyl

Quoting: Egonaut

Quoting: rkfgThis is very bad and stupid. They basically force Valve to set the same prices everywhere, no matter how strong economic is in certain countries. I

No they don't. They force Valve and other Publishers to redeem keys all over the EU no matter in which EU country they have been bought. If Valve changes the Prices due to this, it's all up to them and not forced by anyone.

Valve doesn't set the price of a game, publishers do. Valve applies publisher set regional pricing and key validation restrictions so some countries don't have to pay the same price as more economically powerful nations and regions. This was asked for by both players and publishers.

I'm pretty sure Valve and Publishers alike did it for market reasons, not out of charity. Regardless of their intentions, blocking the access for someone from a different EU country to the same discounts is illegal.

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Quoting: GuestEither the fines will stay that low and the law will be partially ignored or the regional pricing will disappear in the EU and the poorer EU countries will be de facto out of the market.

We are still speaking about videogames, then not necessity goods, for which there is already almost no regional pricing in EU countries, of course excluding a few exceptions (such as CP2077 in Poland).

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Quoting: vhost

Quoting: LordDaveTheKind

Quoting: CorbenI'm wondering which are those price differences within the EU? Checking SteamDB the countries using Euros aren't listed separately. So I guess at least via the Steam store those prices are all the same. Then it will be keys that you can buy through retail boxes, and I guess there the store which sells them defines the price. Having those region locked seems strange to me.

I guess it is referring to the practice of distributing some Game Keys and blocking them if issued in a different country, which sounds like a scheme for applying different prices.

Only few eu countries use euro.

It doesn't matter. The principles of Common European Market have been effective long before the introduction of the Euro currency.

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Quoting: rkfgThis is very bad and stupid. They basically force Valve to set the same prices everywhere, no matter how strong economic is in certain countries.

The fine is related to EU countries, for which each company (regardless of the origin) must apply the same price in each of them if they want to sell.
If you check https://steamdb.info [External Link], EU countries always appear in one line, and if you buy in any of the EU countries that single line (as well as all the related promotions) must apply.

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Quoting: CorbenI'm wondering which are those price differences within the EU? Checking SteamDB the countries using Euros aren't listed separately. So I guess at least via the Steam store those prices are all the same. Then it will be keys that you can buy through retail boxes, and I guess there the store which sells them defines the price. Having those region locked seems strange to me.

I guess it is referring to the practice of distributing some Game Keys and blocking them if issued in a different country, which sounds like a scheme for applying different prices.

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Quoting: CatKiller

Quoting: LordDaveTheKindThis approach was real 10 years ago. It has changed nowadays

No. They've included the (proprietary) library with their (proprietary) driver, exactly as I said. What they haven't done, and aren't likely to, is help open source projects - like vkd3d or Q2RTX - make any use of that. I'd like it if it were different, but it isn't.

It is:
https://www.khronos.org/news/press/vulkan-sdk-tools-and-drivers-are-ray-tracing-ready [External Link]

It is a company, with Resource Management and project assignments for its employees. It isn't that they wake up in a morning and say: "wow, let's help vkd3d-proton guys today".

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