4M Fine Free Of Charge

Update: A company spokesman said: During the seven year investigation Valve has cooperated fully, providing all requested evidence and information to the Commission.

We disagree with these findings, and plan to appeal the decision.

Such practices deprive European consumers of the benefits of the EU Digital Single Market and of the opportunity to shop around for the most suitable offer in the EU.

However it did not make a strong case for that change.

It also found d emand for cross-border access to games, and software generally, relatively low versus other content services.).

It also warned the elimination of region locks could result in games publishers raising prices in some less affluent regions to avoid price arbitrage.

However, Valve declined to admit that it broke the law, as the EC demanded.

Valve disagrees with the EC findings and the fine levied against Valve.

Instead the EC alleges that Valve enabled geo-blocking by providing Steam activation keys and upon the publishers request locking those keys to particular territories (region locks) within the EEA.

Such keys allow a customer to activate and play a game on Steam when the user has purchased it from a third-party reseller.

4M Fine Free Of Charge

Valve provides Steam activation keys free of charge and does not receive any share of the purchase price when a game is sold by third-party resellers (such as a retailer or other online store).

Approximately just 3 of all games using Steam (and none of Valves own games) at the time were subject to the contested region locks in the EEA.

Nonetheless, because of the ECs concerns, Valve actually turned off region locks within the EEA starting in 2015, unless those region locks were necessary for local legal requirements (such as German content laws) or geographic limits on where the Steam partner is licensed to distribute a game.

The elimination of region locks may also cause publishers to raise prices in less affluent regions to avoid price arbitrage.

There are no costs involved in sending activation keys from one country to another, and the activation key is all a user needs to activate and play a PC game.

We also made a correction after initially stating that the EUs investigation had taken four years, starting in 2017.

That was the date the Commission announced it was launching an in-depth investigation.