Good, fuck geoblocking. Bandai 340k Capcom 396k Focus 2.8m Koch 1m Zenimax 1.6m Valve 1.6m
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_21_170
Judgement from the EU court of justice: https://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/2023-09/cp230147en.pdf
No that’s exactly the same thing. They can offer the game for a discounted price in some EU countries, nobody said they can’t. What they don’t can is tell other EU citizens that they are not able to buy the product in those EU countries. I don’t know why you can’t understand this simple fact.
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No it’s not. Telling someone from California that they can’t buy products in Mississippi is WAY different than telling them they are offered a different price in the two states. They are not told that they can’t buy it. Your analogy does not translate to the situation.
That’s not what they’re told though. They are told “yes, you can buy our product.”
What you’re saying doesn’t make sense. You’re telling me you don’t have a problem with regional pricing (within the EU) on digital goods, but you’re stating that companies must offer that same ‘regional’ pricing to everyone (within the EU)… that’s no longer regional pricing, it’s all just one price then. These two lines of thought completely contradict each other. How can you have regional pricing if you want everyone from every region to be offered the same price?
Do you really think that companies who offer discounts on digital goods to buyers in poorer regions are being nefarious? If the companies are not able to regionally price the games, then they cannot offer a discount to the poorer regions, and all that happens is everyone in the poorer regions ends up paying more.
At this point I just lost hope to make you understand. One last chance: Italian man wants to buy Skyrim in Hungary and he is told he can’t. That, under EU law is not allowed. That is geoblocking. That is against free trade in the EU. This is exactly the same as if you would tell Californian man he can’t buy Skyrim in Mississippi.
You don’t want to understand, am I right? I don’t get you.
He understands you, but you don’t understand him… let me try to explain:
The EU laws essentially create an equalized economy between participating countries, similar to the analogy that someone in California can buy a product in Mississippi (sort of --we’ll get to this), someone in Italy should be able to buy the same product from Hungary at relatively the same price using the same currency or equivalent.
Now, I don’t live in the EU and I don’t know how it works over there, but in the US, someone buying a product must pay state sales tax; however, if the item is purchased from one state and shipped to another, the purchaser pays the state sales tax to where the product is being shipped. For example, if someone in California wants to buy a game from a retailer in Mississippi, the California buyer would pay California state sales tax.
This works fine within the US and EU, but what about non-US or non-EU countries? For example, Canada’s dollar (CAD) is not as valued as the US dollar (USD), but Canadians sometimes get stuck paying US dollar prices. This is a problem because the CAD is only valued at 74% of a USD (26% difference).
Now, scale the issue to developing countries. It takes 361.90 Zimbabwe dollars (ZWD) to equal 1 USD; therefore, if someone lived in Zimbabwe and they wanted to buy a 60 USD game, it would cost 21,714 ZWD, and this wouldn’t include shipping, taxes, etc. For someone ACTUALLY getting paid in ZWD, living in and amongst the Zimbabwe economy, it would be completely impossible to afford that game.
So how do you solve this problem?
Companies try to solve it by adjusting prices specific to each currency / country. For example, Valve might determine through research that a 60 USD game although equivalent in price to 21,714 ZWD is more proportionally equivalent to the Zimbabwe economy if it costs just 3,619 ZWD (ie. 10 USD); therefore, Valve may encourage the devs to sell the game cheaper in Zimbabwe than the US.
ok, great… everyone is happy? Wrong!
Scalpers will exchange USD for ZWD and buy a crap ton of copies at the ZWD price and then resell the games in USD, making a huge profit. For physical products, this isn’t as major of an issue because shipping costs, customs, etc would quickly destroy any potential profits; however, for digital products… it is a major problem, and company shareholders don’t look too kindly on “lost potential revenue”, especially when they were trying to do what was best for humanity in a developing country that someone else is taking advantage of.
Enter: Sales Geo-Blocking
Now we’re getting back to what @[email protected] was saying; since the EU is now enforcing fines, Valve and these companies may just stop trying to resolve the problem all together and just forget about Zimbabwe which is a travesty.
lol
No, I understand. You are fine with regional pricing as long as there’s absolutely no way to enforce regional pricing. Which, when talking about a purely digital storefront, means there will be no more regional pricing.
This has already started happening in some regard. Recently, many games on Steam have already had their regional pricing removed, to the ire of gamers in poorer regions.
Truly a massive W