Nintendo has contested a 149.1 million euro ($232 million) fine it received from EU regulators in 2002 for price fixing.

ImageNintendo said that the fine, which it received for colluding with seven distributors to raise prices of games and consoles between 1991 and 1998, was one of the biggest single fines in EU competition law.

" The penalty was unfair, illegal, even shocking," Ian Forrester, a lawyer for Nintendo, told the European Court of First Instance in Luxembourg on Monday.

According to a Bloomberg report, the Brussels-based European Commission said that the penalty reflected Nintendo' s position as producer and supplier.

" The fine was not of a capricious nature, or based on wild estimates," said Xavier Lewis, a lawyer for the commission. " This fine was for an infringement that was considered very serious."

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Now normally i wouldn' t give a damn, but this is why i could only afford to buy a new N64 game once every month I paid £70 ($137) for Turok 2 (and even more for Perfect Dark when that was released in 2000 - although they' re only talking about 91 - 98) and had a Saturn and PlayStation habbit to feed too. I wasn' t happy.

The EU is annoying. They shouldn' t even exist. In a free market you wouldn' t have these issues with pricing and months of delays to get the same product that Americans get.

That being said Nintendo does deserve to pay for price gauging. However I still put their right of choosing their own prices above the EUs right of choosing Nintendos prices.

The EU is annoying. They shouldn' t even exist. In a free market you wouldn' t have these issues with pricing and months of delays to get the same product that Americans get

EU is good. EU is more than trade regulations, in anycase its good that someone controls things like this.

The penalty was unfair, illegal, even shocking,"

Huh.

Somewhat similar to their price point in the first place.

In an ideal free market system, this wouldn' t be happening, but quite frankly, if they couldn' t see this coming...

ORIGINAL: Vx Chemical

The EU is annoying. They shouldn' t even exist. In a free market you wouldn' t have these issues with pricing and months of delays to get the same product that Americans get

EU is good. EU is more than trade regulations, in anycase its good that someone controls things like this.

The EU has uses, but it' s rather cavalier in the way it does things. Every week you hear of the EU fining company X for stupid amounts of money, where in other areas there is no issue for the same circumstances. No wonder why companies are hesitant in bringing products to Europe (hence all the delays).

It' s possible that it' s still a bit that way. I have sold some games from time to time and my distributor (who only had a small amount of Nintendo games) gladly pointed me towards Nintendo themselves to order Nintendo games from (when they themselves didn' t have them in of course).
I even got the number and so on which I thought was a bit too friendly considering the fact that different distributors should be competitors. Even if both don' t sell exactly the same products.

The thing is, both of them were " quite" expensive too. And Nintendo actually offered prices that were juuuuust below the usual prices in stores :P Of course bigger stores get better deals but still. It' s not that big of a difference. So it kind of felt like those big distributors actually cooperated and tried to keep prices at a high level.