Free trade of goods and services within the European Union is one of the key pillars and concepts that the union is founded on and the European Commission has now launched an investigation into Steam and its practices of making certain activation keys available only in certain regions and countries.
"The investigation focuses on whether the agreements in question require or have required the use of activation keys for the purpose of geo-blocking. In particular, an "activation key" can grant access to a purchased game only to consumers in a particular EU Member State (for example the Czech Republic or Poland). 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."
The European Commission has launched the investigation on its own accord, and five publishers, Bandai Namco, Capcom, Focus Home, Koch Media and ZeniMax (Bethesda), are also part of the investigation.