Valve fails to get out of paying its EU geo-blocking fine::Valve has failed to convince a court that it didn’t infringe EU law by geo-blocking activation keys, according to a new ruling.
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 an 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.
Which means that companies make more money paying the fine whenever they get caught, than just not doing whatever illegal thing they’re doing.
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.
