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A four-year antitrust investigation into PC games geo-blocking in the European Union by distribution platform Valve and five games publishers has led to fines totalling €7.8 million (~$9.4M) after the Commission confirmed today that the bloc’s rules had been breached.
The geo-blocking practices investigated since 2017 concerned around 100 PC video games of different genres, including sports, simulation and action games.
In addition to Valve — which has been fined just over €1.6M — the five sanctioned games publishers are: Bandai Namco (fined €340k), Capcom (€396k), Focus Home (€2.8M), Koch Media (€977k) and ZeniMax (€1.6M).
The Commission said the fines were reduced by between 10% and 15% owing to cooperation from the companies, with the exception of Valve who it said chose not to cooperate (a “prohibition Decision” rather than a fine reduction was applied in its case).
Valve has been contacted for comment.
The antitrust investigation begun in February 2017, with a formal statement of objections issued just over two years later when the Commission accused the companies of “entering into bilateral agreements to prevent consumers from purchasing and using PC video games acquired elsewhere than in their country of residence” in contravention of EU rules.
The mechanisms used by the companies to prevent certain cross-border sales of certain PC games were geo-blocked Steam activation keys and bilateral licensing and distribution agreements to restrict certain cross-border sales.
EU lawmakers has now found that these business practices partitioned certain European markets according to national borders — denying regional consumers the benefits of the EU’s Digital Single Market to shop around for the best offer.
Commenting in a statement, EVP Margrethe Vestager, who heads up competition policy for the bloc, said: “Today’s sanctions against the ‘geo-blocking’ practices of Valve and five PC video game publishers serve as a reminder that under EU competition law, companies are prohibited from contractually restricting cross-border sales. Such practices deprive European consumers of the benefits of the EU Digital Single Market and of the opportunity to shop around for the most suitable offer in the EU.”.
According to the Commission’s investigation, geo-blocking of Steam activation keys prevented activation of certain of the five games’ publishers titles outside of Czechia, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
It said agreements between the companies to geo-block activation keys had lasted between one and five years and were found to have been implemented at various times between September 2010 and October 2015.
While four of the games publishers (not Capcom) were found to have entered into licensing and distribution agreements with various PC games distributors (not Value) in the European Economic Area (EEA) which contained clauses which restricted cross-border sales of the affected titles within the EEA, including the aforementioned Central and Eastern European countries.
The Commission said these agreements lasted generally longer (“between three and 11 years”), and were implemented at different times between March 2007 and November 2018.
Since the investigation started, EU lawmakers have passed a regulation against unjustified geo-blocking. Although the legislation only applies to PC video games distributed on CDs or DVDs, not to downloads. So games are only partially covered.
A Commission review of how the geo-blocking regulation is operating, published last November, discussed a possible extension of its scope in a range of areas, including for games. However it did not make a strong case for that change. (It also found demand for cross-border access to games (and software generally) relatively low vs other content services.)
But while games distributed via digital downloads look set to remain outside the scope of the EU’s unjustified geo-blocking regulation, the fines against Valve et al show that geo-blocking can still be a legal minefield as contractual agreements to restrict cross-border sales run counter to the bloc’s antitrust rules.
The specific breaches are of Article 101 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) and Article 53 of the Agreement on the European Economic Area which prohibit agreements between companies that prevent, restrict or distort competition within the EU’s Single Market, per the Commission.
Rocket Lab has launched its 18th mission, and the first of 2021, as of 8:26 PM NZT (2:30 AM EST). The ‘Another One Leaves The Crust’ mission took off from Rocket Lab’s Launch Complex 1 on the Mahia Peninsula in New Zealand, and flew a single communications microsatellite on behalf of client OHB Group, a satellite manufacturer based in Europe with facilities in Germany, Sweden and the Czech Republic.
Rocket Lab’s launches often feature payloads from more than one customer on the same Electron launch vehicle, but this dedicated payload launch is an example of how the flexibility of its smaller rocket can serve customers even for single small satellite missions. The rocket successfully delivered its payload as intended shortly following take-off.
While Rocket Lab has been developing and testing a booster stage recovery process to help it re-use part of its launch vehicles on subsequent flights, this particular mission did not include a recovery attempt. The company has had significant success with that development process however, and recovered its first booster last year. Sometime this year, it’s expected to attempt a recovery that includes a mid-air catch of the returning first stage via helicopter.
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HiPeople, a HR tech startup based in Berlin that wants to automate the reference checking process, has raised $3 million in seed funding.
Leading the round is Mattias Ljungman’s Moonfire, with participation from Capnamic Ventures, and Cherry Ventures. It follows a $1.1 million pre-seed in late 2019. Notably, the seed round was closed fully remote, without any in-person meetings. “Just like the hiring processes of HiPeople’s clients,” founders Jakob Gillmann and Sebastian Schüller told me in an email.
HiPeople says the investment will be used to support growth so that more recruiters can hire remotely using automated reference checks. Longer term, the company is developing a candidate analytics platform to provide rich data and insights on each candidate and enable what it frames as “data-driven” hiring.
“Abstractly-speaking HiPeople is in the talent insights business,” say Gillmann and Schüller. “It’s mission is to enable better hiring by automatically collecting and analyzing talent data, and providing rich insights. HiPeople currently solves this by automating candidate reference checks from request, to collection, and analysis. This allows companies to extend the information they have on a candidate without additional manual work”.
The idea behind the software-as-a-service is that HiPeople’s approach creates a seamless user experience for the recruiter, and “verified, in-depth reference checks they can trust”. As a result, the startup claims that its users on average collect 2x the amount of references on a candidate, in 50% of the time. “Traditionally, reference checks are underutilized due to the highly manual process, and often only exclusively used for executive hiring. HiPeople dusts off reference checks, and enables rich talent insights by rethinking how they are done,” says HiPeople’s founders.
HiPeople’s customers span fast growing startups to tech scale-ups and more established upper mid-market companies. For example, process mining company Celonis, which doubled its workforce in the last 12 months to 1,200 employees globally, uses HiPeople to improve hiring quality for roles in San Francisco, Munich and Tokyo. “By programmatically conducting reference checks the company hires talent based on verified insights on topics like areas of improvement, skills, teamwork style, or work values,” explains HiPeople.
Adds Moonfire’s Mattias Ljungman: “Workflow automation of repetitive processes, and insights on the candidate that go beyond the limitations of the CV, are a clear pain for anybody in recruiting. The Covid-influenced reality of remote work, hence remote hiring practices, has increased the complexity of finding the right talent. HiPeople created a way to enable anybody who is hiring to make better decisions, whilst improving processes and increasing hiring velocity”.
Gillmann and Schüller tell me that in Europe, HiPeople mainly competes with the existing infrastructure and processes recruiters use to manually conduct references checks. In the U.S., companies like Xref or Crosschq are more direct competitors in terms of automating reference checks.
Alibaba’s billionaire founder resurfaced as he spoke to 100 rural teachers through a video call, three months after his last public appearance in October, sending the e-commerce firm’s shares up more than 8% in Hong Kong.
A recording of the call was first posted on a news portal backed by the government of Zhejiang, the eastern province where Alibaba is headquartered, and the video was verified by an Alibaba spokesperson.
Speculations swirled around Ma’s whereabouts after media reported in December that he skipped the taping of a TV program he created. Ma, known for his love for the limelight, has seen his e-commerce empire Alibaba and fintech giant Ant Group increasingly in the crosshairs of the Chinese authorities in recent months.
Ma last appeared publicly at a conference where he castigated China’s financial regulatory system in front of a room of high-ranked officials. His controversial remark, according to reports, prompted the Chinese regulator to abruptly halt Ant’s initial public offering, which would have been the biggest public share sale of all time.
Ant has since been working on corporate restructuring and regulatory compliance under the directions of the government. Alibaba, China’s largest e-commerce platform, also came under scrutiny as market regulators opened an investigation into its alleged monopolistic practices.
Some argue that the recent clampdown on Jack Ma’s internet empire signals Beijing’s growing unease with the country’s super-rich and private-sector power brokers.
“Today, Alibaba and its archrival, Tencent, control more personal data and are more intimately involved in everyday life in China than Google, Facebook and other American tech titans are in the United States. And just like their American counterparts, the Chinese giants sometimes bully smaller competitors and kill innovation,” wrote Li Yuan for the New York Times.
“You don’t have to be a member of the Communist Party to see reasons to rein them in.”
In the 50-second clip, Ma is seen talking directly into the camera against what appears to be decorative paintings depicting a water town typical of Zhejiang. An art history book is shown amid a stack of books, alongside a vase of fresh flowers and a ceramic figurine of a stout, reclining man who looks relaxed and content.
Ma addressed the 100 teachers receiving the Jack Ma Rural Teachers Award, which was set up by the Jack Ma Foundation to identify outstanding rural teachers every year. The video also briefly shows Ma visiting a rural boarding school in Zhejiang on January 10. The award ceremony was moved online this year due to the pandemic, Ma told the award recipients.
When Ma announced his retirement plan, he pledged to return to his teaching roots and devote more time to education philanthropy, though the founder still holds considerable sway over Alibaba by keeping a seat in the powerful Alibaba Partnership. The legendary billionaire began his career as an English teacher in Hangzhou, and on Weibo, China’s Twitter equivalent, he nicknames himself the “ambassador for rural teachers.”
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/20/jack-ma-resurfaces/
