In judgment T-172/21 handed down on Wednesday 27 September, the General Court of the European Union confirmed that Valve and five video game publishers had infringed EU competition law by restricting cross-border sales of certain video games on the Steam platform.
The judgment follows a 2021 European Commission decision concerning Steam platform operator Valve and five online game publishers (Bandai, Capcom, Focus Home, Koch Media and ZeniMax). At the time, the Commission found that these companies had colluded on several occasions between 2010 and 2015 to restrict access to certain video games in several countries of the European Economic Area by means of territorial control functionalities.
Valve’s appeal was eventually dismissed by the General Court. The court considers that there is sufficient evidence of the existence of an agreement or concerted practice.
The purpose of the geo-blocking of activation keys was to prevent distributors or users from buying these games in countries where they were cheaper. Therefore, it was not a question of protecting the publishers’ copyright, as Valve claimed, but of eliminating parallel imports in order to “protect the high royalty amounts collected by the publishers, or the margins earned by Valve”, the General Court summarised.
In its judgment, it also points out that copyright does not guarantee that its holder can systematically demand the highest possible remuneration. Nor does it authorise behaviour that leads to artificial price differences between partitioned national markets. “Such partitioning and such an artificial price difference to which it gives rise are irreconcilable with the completion of the internal market”, the General Court concluded.
The judgment: https://aeur.eu/f/8rj (Original version in French by Hélène Seynaeve)