European Commission Fines Valve, Publishers for Regional Pricing and GeoBlocking
techpowerup.com
techpowerup.com
Sigh
> Of course, while this money will come directly out of pocket from the convicted companies, what this does in practice is that these companies will likely no longer provide videogames at discounted prices for countries with lower purchasing power
Yup.
Yet again, European lawmakers show that they don't understand the online market.
The idea that you can tell a company "You need to allow your consumers of any country to buy as if they were in any other country, so that they can shop around and buy at the lowest price you offer no matter where they are" and still expect that company to offer region-based discounts is so ridiculous I struggle to put words on it.
Either the commission had a beef against Valve for some other reason, or the members are dumb old bureaucrats who don't understand that a virtual product doesn't work like a physical product.
Do you have any examples of this? Valve didn't lower the price for low income regions out of the kindness of their heart, they did it because otherwise nobody from those regions would buy the product at all. In cases of price discrimination like this it's the high income consumer that gets screwed over. Without it Valve has no choice but to offer the same low price, doing anything else would just reduce their revenue further.
That seems rather odd