Can/Will developers prevent the use of VPNs

There will be various reasons for release dates and sometimes it will vary for very specific reasons (i.e. the 2 week gap between US and UK PS4 release dates). But with Titanfall the gap between the release dates between the US and UK appears to be simply down to the difference in when new games are released for each country. One of my points was simply that if Titanfall was released tomorrow in the UK then this would have greatly reduced people using VPN's to unlock the game.

Obviously it doesn't stop the big variations in regional pricing or currency conversion and therefore people would still be using VPN's to buy the game cheaper.
 
www.tesco.com can be a bit funny when my VPN is on. Depends on which server/country I pick.

For me though, VPN is all about circumventing Virgin's traffic shaping. I don't go over the fair usage policy, but I'm fed up of being told how often I can use Youtube! Country selection is also useful if a Youtube video isn't available in the UK. Oddly enough however, the VPN frequently has a side effect on my line speed that's meant to be only 20 megabit :-) Still getting 1 megabit upload though.

20mb from virgin media? Assuming you're on cable and not their ADSL service the minimum they sell is 30mb and they upgraded anyone lower up to that (soon to be going up to 50mb :)). You sure this isn't why it says 30?

Also don't think I've ever been hit my virgin traffic shaping oddly enough, no matter how much downloading I do at any time of day I've never seen any slow down. I'm only on 30mb so it should kick in quite quickly. Tend to use youtube quite a lot too.
 
There will be various reasons for release dates and sometimes it will vary for very specific reasons (i.e. the 2 week gap between US and UK PS4 release dates). But with Titanfall the gap between the release dates between the US and UK appears to be simply down to the difference in when new games are released for each country. One of my points was simply that if Titanfall was released tomorrow in the UK then this would have greatly reduced people using VPN's to unlock the game.

Obviously it doesn't stop the big variations in regional pricing or currency conversion and therefore people would still be using VPN's to buy the game cheaper.

If EA stopped shafting people on prices, people probably wouldn't bother with VPNs. If Titanfall for example was £30, which I would class as a standard amount for a digital game, a lot more people would be happy to pay that price, instead of using a Mexican VPN. You'll of course still get a minority who will do it to get ~£5 off, but most wouldn't bother.
 
20mb from virgin media? Assuming you're on cable and not their ADSL service the minimum they sell is 30mb and they upgraded anyone lower up to that (soon to be going up to 50mb :)). You sure this isn't why it says 30?

Ahhh, well you see - we in Stafford only got upgraded from 10 to 20 this time last year. We received the next upgrade notification by email recently where you click on a link and enter in the Stafford postcode. It said that Stafford will be upgraded to 30 not until the 2nd half of this year. To confirm this, I turned my VPN off and Speedtest.net dropped back down to 20. P.S. it is cable.
 
Think it would be too hard to justify. ''We are banning you from the game you paid for because you accessed it earlier than the date we for some reason selected that was later than another territory''..........

I could only see them possibly taking a dim view on using the vpn to access, e.g mexican store to get it cheaper, but again, just begs the question why is a digitaly distrubuted game cheaper in one territory vs another.

Short answer = nah
 
They cannot stop you using VPN's but they could ban your account is the short answer.

Why they still have these split release dates is totally beyond me in these times and region locking should have vanished with the arrival of the DVD.
 
vpn are a very small issue ime. i guess like ms live they can stop high ping on lan as thats vpn/net over lan but its hard to detect if ping is great and you'd be agaist basicconnections - maybe dont ban legitimate isp ips. like virgin etc but its all too much imo.
 
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