Valve fails to get out of paying its EU geo-blocking fine

Comments

• Telodzrum@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Good. Fuck all DRM

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  • sneezycat@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I mean, they just paid a 1.6 million € fine.

    Entertain me this hypothetical:

    You’re a pizza delivery person, and you know there are some routes you can take to save you more than 20 min for some deliveries, but you’re going the wrong way in one way roads.

    One day you get caught, and you get fined 20 cents. You make and extra 5 bucks per delivery. Will you stop going the wrong way to save you 20 min each time you have to do those deliveries?

    Well, this is the fundamental problem with fines. They are stupidly, gargantually disproportionate to what they’re trying to achieve.

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    • UlrikHD@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Valve won’t break the law for other publisher’s profits. Steam is just a store front, they were geo blocking on behalf of other publishers.

      Valve also doesn’t take a cut from steam key sales not bought directly through their storefront, so the geoblocking keys isn’t something that will impact them. More likely, this will result in citizens of poorer EU countries getting screwed over by having to pay higher prices for games, since they can’t stop EU citizens from taking advantage of buying the game from the poorest EU country.

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    • Telodzrum@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Progress isn’t linear and it sure as hell doesn’t come when we say the problem isn’t worth even addressing because our current tools aren’t big enough for its scale.

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    • Etterra@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Yeah, fines need to be calculated on an exponential scale based on the income and value of the target. The richer they are, the more painful the penalty. One wrong move and the billionaire is reduced to a meth addicted hobo living under a bridge.

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• Anonymousllama@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Good, a well deserved fine for shitty price fixing actions.

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  • UlrikHD@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Localised pricing is good though? Is it really fair ask someone in India to pay the same price as an American? If you can’t geo block keys, you can’t stop people taking advantage by using a VPN to buy games from whatever country got the lowest price. The result will just be publishers keeping the high price for every country, screwing poorer regions over.

    Also, what they did wouldn’t really qualify as price fixing.

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    • clyne@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Did you read the article? This isn’t comparable to your India vs America example, it’s specific to prices only within the EU where the EU has digital market rules that specifically prohibit this.

      What Valve did does sound like price-fixing too according to your linked definition of “an agreement among competitors to [fix] price levels”:

      “Valve and five publishers (Bandai Namco, Capcom, Focus Home, Koch Media and ZeniMax) agreed to use geo-blocking so that activation keys sold in some countries … would not work in other member states. That would prevent someone … buying a cheaper key … where prices are lower.”

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  • Gabu@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Having lower prices for poorer regions isn’t price fixing. The real issue is that it’s hard as fuck to find a way to have localized pricing when every bordering country, richer or poorer, uses the same currency.

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• Magzmak@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I agree but I’ll check it out in a little once more bugs get ironed out.

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  • EyesEyesBaby@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Lost lemmings

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  • ABCDE@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Which bugs?

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    • teddyxfire@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Geo-blocking bugs, duuuuuh

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    • Potatos_are_not_friends@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Sometimes I wonder if these out of context messages are bugs in a lemmy app, user error, or bot.

      It probably happens a lot on reddit too, but they get 10x as much comments so it gets buried

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  • AdmiralShat@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Wrong thread

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