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.

You don’t want to understand, am I right? I don’t get you.

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