The European Commission has fined Valve , owner of the Steam digital store, together to publishers Bandai Namco, Capcom, Focus Home, Koch Media and ZeniMax (destined to end up in the hands of Microsoft ) for a total of 7.8 million euros for violation of antitrust regulations . After years of investigation, the EU has determined that Valve and publishers have limited the cross-border sales of certain PC games based on the geographic location of users within the European Economic Area, implementing practices of “ geo-blocking “.

The fines to publishers exceed € 6 million in total , with Focus Home having to pay more than all: 2.8 million euros. Following it we find ZeniMax with 1, 66 millions, Koch Media with 997 thousand euros, Capcom with 396 thousand euros and Bandai Namco with 340 thousand euros. All publishers have collaborated with the European Commission and for this they have obtained a discount of 10% (except Capcom which obtained the 15%). Valve, on the other hand, chose not to collaborate with the Commission and for this was fined 1, 62 millions of euros. In short, given what was inflicted on Koch Media and Focus Home, Valve went luxury (in any case, the fines are limited, in our opinion).

“More than 50% of all Europeans play video games. The video game industry in Europe is thriving and is now worth beyond 17 billions of euros. Today’s sanctions against the geo-blocking practices of Valve and five PC game publishers serve as a reminder that under EU competition law, companies are prohibited from contractually restricting cross-border sales. Such practices deprive European consumers of the benefits of the EU digital single market and the opportunity to shop around to find the most suitable offer within the Union, “said Margrethe Vestager, executive vice president responsible for r competition.

What is geo-blocking

According to the European Commission, Valve and the publishers in question have distributed activation keys for PC titles that work selectively in some EU countries and not others , violating current regulations. In this way, publishers prevented consumers from buying games in countries where they cost less to play them in countries where the same title cost more. There has therefore been a “geo-blocking” of the activation keys , designed to prevent players located outside of a member state to activate a security in another country. The agreement between Valve and the publishers, according to the European Commission, has fragmented “the European economic market in violation of antitrust rules”.

In particular, these practices “ prevented the activation of some of the PC games of these publishers outside the Czech Republic , Poland, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania , in response to ‘unwanted’ requests from consumers (so-called ‘passive sales’). These lasted from one to five years and were implemented, as appropriate, between September 2010 and October 2015 “.

There were also geo-blocking “in the form of licensing and distribution agreements concluded bilaterally between four of the five publishers (i.e. Bandai, Focus Home, Koch Media and ZeniMax) and some of their respective distributors (other than Valve) in the European economic space. ” This practice has been carried out for a longer time, from 3 to 11 years depending on the publisher (between March 2007 and November 2018 in the worst case). The geo-blocking concerned about 100 PC video games of different genres.