Valve’s region-blocking on the Steam digital distribution platform and alleged price-fixing by Asus have brought the companies to the attention of the European Commission. The European Commission has opened a series of investigations into the behaviour of companies including Valve and Asus, on allegations of common market violations and price fixing.
In three separate cases, the European Commission’s antitrust arm has begun investigating claims that major industry names have been flouting the law – beginning with Asus, which is named alongside Denon & Marantz, Philips, and Pioneer as having been refusing to allow online retailers to set their own pricing for goods including audio equipment and laptops. Valve, meanwhile, is named alongside publishers Bandai Namco, Capcom, Focus Home, Koch Media, and Zenimax as using geographic restrictions on content to strangle parallel trade within the European Union’s Single Market. A final case, of less interest to gamers and electronics enthusiasts, has been opened into the actions of tour operators Thomas Cook, Kuoni, REWE, and TUI, and Meliá Hotels with which they are accused of collaborating to discriminate against customers based on their countries of origin or residence to drive up pricing.
‚ E-commerce should give consumers a wider choice of goods and services, as well as the opportunity to make purchases across borders. The three investigations we have opened today focus on practices where we suspect companies are trying to deny these benefits for consumers, ‚ said Commissioner Margrethe Vestager of her organisation’s investigations. ‚ The cases concern the consumer electronics, video games and hotel accommodation sectors. More specifically, we are looking into whether these companies are breaking EU competition rules by unfairly restricting retail prices or by excluding customers from certain offers because of their nationality or location. ‚
Valve, certainly, could find itself in hot water as a result of the investigation: in 2014 the company introduced new trading rules in Steam specifically to curb grey-market trading of goods – where games are purchased in one region for a lower price then traded or sold to a higher-priced region. In the EC’s words, ‚ this may amount to a breach of EU competition rules by reducing cross-border competition as a result of restricting so-called „parallel trade“ within the Single Market and preventing consumers from buying cheaper games that may be available in other Member States. ‚
Neither Valve, Asus, nor any other company named in the cases has yet issued comment on the matter.

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The tablet market’s boom days may be over, with IDC reporting a 15.6 percent decline in shipments over 2016 with most of the losses occurring at the premium end. Market-watcher IDC has published figures suggesting the tablet trend may be finished, pointing to a 15.6 percent decline in sales in the past year.
Previously, consumer interest in tablets has been blamed for an ongoing – though slowing – five-year decline in sales of traditional desktop and laptop PCs, with IDC projecting that tablets would overtake traditional PC sales by 2015. Now, though, it’s the turn of tablet vendors to worry, with IDC’s latest report pointing to a whopping 15.6 percent decline in sales for 2016.
Based on the company’s preliminary figures, shipments of tablets – defined to cover both dedicated tablet devices and convertibles like the Surface family of half-tablet half-laptop portables – dropped from 207.2 million in 2015 to 174.8 million in 2016. For those keeping score, that’s considerably below traditional PC sales for either year, with those accounting for 275.8 million and 260.2 million in 2015 and 2016 respectively for a 5.7 percent annual decline.
By far the biggest losers for the year were companies specialising in high-end, premium tablet products: Apple saw its shipments drop 14.2 percent for the year, while rival Samsung saw a 20.5 percent decline over the same period. Those offering products at the cheaper end of the market, by contrast, enjoyed a bumper year: Huawei’s shipments jumped nearly 50 percent, though it still holds a minority 5.6 percent share of the overall market, while Amazon’s Fire family of tablets shipped nearly double in 2016 compared with 2015 at a 98.8 percent growth rate.
‚ The sentiment around the tablet market continues to grow stale despite a lot of talk about vendors pivoting their product portfolios toward the detachable segment, ‚ opined Ryan Reith, program vice president with IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Device Trackers division, of his company’s findings. ‚ Typical tablets without a dedicated keyboard, which IDC refers to as slate tablets, are continuing to lose relevancy across all regions and, as a result, we see the decline happening globally. We do see future growth in some emerging markets like the Middle East & Africa as well as Central & Eastern Europe with the sole catalysts being simplicity and low cost. Unfortunately for the industry these are the devices that don’t equate to large revenues. ‚
Fuller figures are available from IDC’s press release .

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