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Valve fails to get out of paying its EU geo-blocking fine
(www.engadget.com)
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this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2023
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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.
Yes, this will just mean that game publishers will set one price for the whole EU which will be based on the income in the richest countries. They can still geoblock countries outside of the EU, just not within it.
Progress isn’t linear and it sure as hell doesn’t come when we say the problem isn’t worth even addressing because our current tools aren’t big enough for its scale.
Yeah, fines need to be calculated on an exponential scale based on the income and value of the target. The richer they are, the more painful the penalty. One wrong move and the billionaire is reduced to a meth addicted hobo living under a bridge.