Could standardised RRP be coming?
Are you a gamer in Germany fed up of not being able to get the same version of a game as other countries in Europe? Perhaps you’re a UK gamer fed up that you’re being charged more for a game that your French friends for the same download. Well, a new piece of legislation may end up leveling the playing field for gamers right across Europe.
The European Commission have proposed new legislation that would see digital storefronts across Europe forced to acknowledge that region locking digital content is in many ways a futile task.
The Digital Single Market Strategy aims to tear down location based blocking through Europe that locks content to specific regions. The legislation would prevent Microsoft, Sony, Valve and Nintendo having separate digital stores for each European country and force them to have a single European digital store with standardised pricing and software availability.
Here’s the bit of interest to us:
“Tackling geo-blocking: too many Europeans cannot use online services that are available in other EU countries, often without any justification; or they are re-routed to a local store with different prices. Such discrimination cannot exist in a Single Market.”
So there you have it, in Europe at least we might soon see the internet treated as a place that exists across multiple countries at once. The sooner this happens worldwide the better, I want to be able to browse Youtube without all those annoying “Not available in your region” notices.
That said, no idea what this does to VATMOSS or if this makes German censored versions of games EU wide. Time will tell on those fronts.
