Valve and five PC video game publishers were fined a total of € 7.8 million (about US $ 9.5 million) by the European Commission for restricting sales of international games in the European Economic Area. The Commission said that companies have geographically blocked around 100 PC video games, preventing them from being activated and played outside some EU countries. This broke the rules of the EU’s digital single market that prohibit such barriers.
The European Commission says that geographic blocking prevents games from being activated outside the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Geographic blocking prevents players who live in EU countries with higher middle income from saving money by buying them in EU states where they are cheaper and activating them on Steam. Activation keys were blocked geographically between 2010 and 2015, said the European Commission.
“Today’s sanctions against the practices of ‘geo-blocking’ by Valve and five PC video game publishers serve as a reminder that, under EU competition law, companies are prohibited from contractually restricting international sales,” said the European Commission’s head of competition policy. “Such practices deprive European consumers of the benefits of the EU’s Digital Single Market and the opportunity to research the most suitable offer in the EU.”
Five publishers were fined in total. Focus Home was fined almost € 2.9 million (about $ 3.5 million), ZeniMax more than € 1.6 million (about $ 2 million), Koch Media almost € 1 million (about $ 1.2 million), Capcom € 396,000 (about $ 480,000) and Bandai Namco € 340,000 (about $ 410,000). As each of these companies cooperated with the investigation, their fines were reduced by between 10 and 15%. Valve, however, chose not to cooperate and was fined more than € 1.6 million (about $ 1.9 million).
The European Commission opened its formal investigation into the practice of geo-blocking in 2017 and formally asked Valve to stop the practice in 2019. Valve previously argued that only a small number of games used activation keys with region lock, and he argued should not be held responsible for region blocks requested by publishers. He said he ended the practice in 2015, with limited exceptions.