The European Commission has fined Valve, Bandai Namco, Capcom, Focus Home Interactive, Koch Media and ZeniMax a combined total of €7.8 million for breaching antitrust rules. Valve did not cooperate with the Commission (a claim that the company denies), and was fined €1.6 million, while the fines for the other five publishers were slightly reduced for their cooperation (not that this helped Focus Home Interactive, which received the biggest share of the fine by far: a whopping €2.9 million of the total).
The judgement is the result of one of three investigations began in 2017, and today the Commission writes that: "Valve and the publishers restricted cross-border sales of certain PC video games on the basis of the geographical location of users within the European Economic Area (‘EEA'), entering into, the so called “geo-blocking” practices." The companies thus "partitioned the EEA market in violation of EU antitrust rules."
