The recent Sony Helldivers 2 "scandal" that resulted in the game being "delisted" in many countries around the world was meet with a lot of protests by the players.
Among those protest, EU player often mentioned the "Anti Geo-Blocking European regulation" claiming that what Sony was doing is de-facto illegal under European laws. At the same time some rebut that this is not the case and the regulation is far to be as restrictive.
I am not interested in the specific case, but this scenario still got me curious and waiting to understand the existing rules a little better. Yet, as the original case involves may other variables (seems the block could be tied to actual infrastructure limitations and staggered release) I would like to just focus on a far simpler scenario to avoid being caught in the specifics.
Let's suppose a gaming company is selling a digital version of a game thru their online store. The store is different for each EU country and in order to buy something another version you would need a separate account (so separate credentials). For some arbitrary reason the company decides that "game A" will not be sold in some countries (note: let's not consider legal reasons like censorship or similar requirement. I get some games may have issues in some countries - for example games depicting WW2/Nazism in Germany and so on). Under these assumption:
- it is legal for the company to just decide that users from a specific EU country can't buy the game?
- assuming that the customers can circumvent the block and buy the game from another region store, would it be legal for the company to block access to the online features of the game based on IP address? And in that case, could the company BAN people that tried to access the game online features from a blocked country (note: I think that "stopping" and "banning" are probably very different actions)
- (optional) assuming that the company is indeed obliged to provide the same games for digital delivery to each EU member state, would the same company for example be able to block every European state from buying a game they only made available in Japan? I assume this should be possible since no European state would be able to access the game and thus there would be no discrimination among European states, but I am not sure my reading is correct.
To support anyone willing to answer, these are the relevant regulations that I could find.
