Several Huge Games Publishers Were Fined £7 Million For Geo-Blocking Sales

If rules that make being part of the EU beneficial get ignored there’s no reason to be part of the EU. Good on them for fining them. Tho it’s so little it won’t make a difference.

When I came across the fact that I was unable to buy certain games on the PSN eshop, I also thought it should be criminal I guess it's only a problem when a big country can't get a game at a smaller country's price. not when a publisher decides to ignore a smaller country altogether.

Call me an idiot but I'll bite - what's the difference between what's being condemned here, and the region-locking of the Wii U and other consoles? Would that be condemned in the same way as these companies, or is it something completely different and I'm stupid?

Imagine than just one console generation ago, Nintendo was Geo-blocking too.

Good. They deserve to be fined as there’s no point in the EU being an economic union if trade is blocked between countries.

There was one tidbit I found interesting "Meanwhile, the five publishers formed deals with each other restricting cross-border sales of games, the EU found", that to me seems like it crosses into breaking competition law too.

@stinky_t it's because Europe is one region and these countries are in that region. Europe is one market and the companies didn't treat them like that.

@stinky_t Basically, you can't subdivide the European Union with region locking, that's what's illegal in this case. Anyone in the EU should have the same digital options.

@darkswabber Only 50% of Europe is in EU anyway.
19 of 38 countries.

I always thought that region-locking consoles was stupid, but restricting game sales like this is even dumber.

@Ventilator theres 27 countries in the EU and more than 38 countries in Europe

Thank goodness we left that terrible EU! 🇬🇧💪

@clvr A more accurate way of saying that would be New York games would not be allowed in Texas or any other combo of states since the US is the same region/market whilst Canada or Mexico are different markets to America.

@sandman89 You realize that means the UK now no longer has that kind of price protection as it's not part of the EU...

@Ventilator I know. But it would be useless if those countries don’t get benefits.

@clvr Pal and NTSC were also different television systems formats, so there were technically reasons behind that divide.
But yeah they are just saying within the EU you cant put up artificial barriers to buying digital games from another part of it.
They are free to prevent buying digitaly from US store in EU. (They frequently do by blocking cards you can use but theres ways arround it )

Absolutely in love with the choice of picture for this article

Enjoy publishers doing regional pricing even more then. Some games are gonna quadruple in price for some countries. It's happened before and will happen again. I think it was Octopath Traveller on PC that got hit with regional pricing and it 4 was times the price of a month of minimum wage in some countries.

So now we're going to have more expensive games and still no Disney+ in our "Eastern" European countries? Cool. I'd prefer it the other way round, though. Let companies adjust prices to local markets, but prevent geo-blocking countries from getting the same services as other "important" European countries like Germany or France.

That's good (I realize I am adding nothing to the conversation here)

@xmkbest And companies wonder why Eastern European countries pirate more.

@clvr
Your example is most certainly wrong.
There are no such laws applicable in NA.
This is a special case for "Europe" because of the EU.
Countries outside the EU, but in Europe can be region-locked.

@Roibeard64 @jamesthemagi @jump ah I see, I knew the reasons for differentiating between PAL and NTSC regions but I didn't know all the other stuff, as a European.

As I said, I wasn't sure, so thanks for the explanation 😃

I think geo-blocking makes sense, this publishers have taken into consideration that certain countries have far lower income so they matched their video games price offers to fit with their economy, having that available to all countries would cause the publishers to loose a lot of money cause people would exploit that system by simply lying about their regional location just to get the game cheaper, so that is why geo-locking was necessary in order to keep that balance. Now that that is no longer allowed, all lower income countries will start having a price inflation on their video games which in the long term they are the only ones getting punished since this won't affect the rest of Europe that have normal prices.

It will be interesting to see what actually comes out of this. Without geo-blocking it's possible that the publishers will raise their prices in the lower income countries, which would be bad... On the other hand, it's not like they currently lower the prices out of the goodness of their heart. If the prices are too high then nobody in that region will buy the games at all. Making some money is better than making none. So it probably still makes sense to keep the lower prices there. If some enterprising people from other countries jump the border to get a good deal, they'd still hardly be the majority. Not like VPNs aren't a thing anyway, if people are really determined.

@jump I think they were being sarcastic at least I hope so.

@sandman89 Hopefully you're being sarcastic.

The reason this practice is rarely seen in the USA is because the economy is roughly the same across all states. The only thing this ruling will do in the EU is drive the price up in countries that can’t afford the games. It will be rare that a publisher will lower the price to match the poorer economy unless it is viable they can make just as much money. How is that EU working if you have such a disparity?

@JohnBlackstar I’m pretty sure it’s not to the same degree, but the cost of living in say California or New York is much greater then a lot of other states. Although I’m sure not to the extent of country to country in the EU

It’s always good to see big companies take accountability.

@sandman89
Wasn’t the EU better for Britain?

If they sold things for what they were worth (production cost plus reasonable level of profit), instead of pushing prices up way past that, to a point they think people are only just willing or able to pay, there wouldn't be this problem. This is especially true for digital games.

@RandomAfricanGamer @jump we can make our own laws. Not being sarcastic

@sandman89 The UK has always been able to make its own laws. However there is an irony to the Uk now having to follow EU rules & laws still to continue it’s no quota & no tariff trade with the EU as part of the deal but as the UK is no longer apart of the EU it now doesn’t any say in those EU rules & law making process so the UK cant now change, debate or object to them which is opposite of the sovereignty which was promised with Brexit.

@Moistnado Video game prices like any other product in a free market (not unbalanced by a monopoly) are set at what people will generally pay for them. If enough people stopped buying games at those prices, then the prices would fall, but that's not happening. (While the United States does have a recommended retail price to generally keep the prices even between stores, retailers could still legally drop the price if they got desperate enough, and eventually the recommended price itself would fall.) Why should producers and developers be restricted from making as much profit as they reasonably can just because they can manage higher profit margins than in many other industries?

As for digital prices, they have to be set even with physical prices despite the lower overhead, or else not enough people would buy the physical versions to keep that part of the industry afloat. If I could always buy digital copies of video games cheaper than the physical versions, then I'd certainly switch to always buying digital up until the cost of the extra external storage I'd potentially need exceeded the money I was saving on the digital discounts.

@jump I know what you are saying but give it time it’s early days. I honestly think the EU might collapse but we’ll see

@sandman89 I've got no idea what you're on about.

The EU has been around since the 50s and has firmly established itself and it's influence with nothing to suggest it's about to collapse.

The UK initiated article 50/Brexit 4 years ago, it's only early days as it took 4 years for the leave campaigners and government to figure what leaving actually meant. lol

@jump I think you’ll find the remainers held the job up.

@sandman89 Nope, it was largely because "Brexit" as a concept wasn't defined at all when the referendum took place so when the reality of Brexit came in of either Hard Brexit or Brexit with a Deal (and what exactly that Deal should be) their votes got split between them despite being for Brexit. It was inevitable since both the real and (the court proven) propaganda promises of it are at odds which each other making a successful Brexit to all literally impossible. The last minute deal put together by Boris Johnson (who promised it would be an "oven ready" deal lol) was voted through as there was no time to renegotiate to avoid a no deal scenario and was actually a worse deal than the one proposed by Theresa May. You are also ignoring that article 50 was triggered before negotiations had even started which literally put the UK's workload behind before it even started which isn't really clever since the EU as the larger economic power had the advantage when making the deal.

In any case none of that really changes that the UK is literally worse off now than before.

@BulbasaurusRex point is that many people are not willing to buy these games at this price. Also, iti isn't a "free market" geo-blocking is a crime! If they want to sell things for less, then let everyone buy for less. It's illegal not to, and rightly so. As for digital sales, if people stopped buying physical, because digital was less than half the price- so what? I thought you liked free markets?

@stinky_t I Think that has more to do with display formats.

@jump you must be one of those remoaners 😆

@sandman89 Nah, just an observant pointing out how ironically the biggest hurdle to Brexit was the Brexiteers themselves who couldn't agree on what Brexit actually is which ultimately delivered a compromised deal that means the UK has to follow rules it has given up making.

@jump nah I don’t agree. I’m confident we are now better off.

@sandman89 milking cows because Brexit is gonna raise the price of milk... ;p

Ok super, now let me buy Japanese things without having to hop through several loops to do so