The European Union has fined Valve and five of the publishers that utilize its PC storefront Steam for millions of dollars for violating rules against geo-blocking at certain times between 2010 and 2015. This means that the accused were restricting gamers in better-off EU nations from purchasing games from other EU storefronts with lower prices. Several of the publishers were also charged with restricting cross-border sales of physical games, which has the same effect.

The loophole of Steam games having various pricing around the world is one that many Steam veterans know very well, and one that Valve has pushed to close at various points in Steam's history. For game collectors, loading up a VPN to grab games at a steep discount or take advantage of a pricing error on any number of global storefronts is commonplace, especially with the price of games going up this generation. This also comes into play when games release at different times around the world, as gamers with the knowhow can set their computer to a far off land and unlock their AAA game hours early. Both of these scenarios are less than ideal for Valve and game publishers, which has taken various steps over the years to make them unfeasible. One of those steps on the publisher side of things is to region lock keys to various regions.

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However, that method of protection is against EU competition law, which was restated by Executive Vice-President Margrethe Vestager in the statement to press about the decision. The local law reads that "companies are prohibited from contractually restricting cross-border sales." The European Commission believes that practices such as this deprive their citizens of the advantages of the EU's unique marketplace, and consider them an antitrust violation. The investigation into this violation began in 2017, with the European Commission notifying each accused party in April of 2019.

European Commission Steam Data Image

Each of the publishers in question (Focus Home, ZeniMax, Koch Media, Capcom, and Bandai Namco) cooperated with the investigation, which reduced their fines. However, Valve has plans to appeal the decision, believing that they're not in the wrong. In a statement released to The Verge, Valve director of marketing Doug Lombardi stated that Valve performed the region-locking at the publisher's request, so the company shouldn't be held liable for the decision. He also confirmed that Valve ceased the practice in 2015, and now only allows games to region lock their codes when they run up against content laws in various EU nations.

The realities of the all-digital future spurned on by storefronts like Steam have begun to rub up against the laws put in place for physical goods decades earlier. It raises important and complicated questions of how global digital purchases need to be and what rights stores and content owners have to keep their prices competitive across regions. A quick glance at deal-filled Twitter accounts will show that users online will jump at any opportunity to grab something for cheap, especially if there's a feeling that they're getting one over on the system. It's just another indication of how fast technology moves and how slow the law can be when it tries to catch up.

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Sources: European Commission, The Verge