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In my opinion the layout itself doesn't impact the SEO that much, if you take the general on-page SEO rules into account (page title, url, H1, content, images, ...)

If these elements are optimized you should consider optimizing the page for a better conversion rate, and if you look at the two examples you just showed I might imagine that the layout Play uses converts better. We recently did some multivariate testing for a big e-commerce site and ended up with a similar page layout, without hurting SEO rankings. Conversion rate increased 12% to the previous layout.

To answer on your first question, Google doesn't read this as France or Germany, but that doesn't mean it is bad for your SEO.

For example, having those different subdirectories in one domain can help you get lots of backlinks to one domain instead of backlinks to all your location based domains.

To answer your second question, your URL doesn't do all of your SEO work... If you use the right title tags, urls, on-page elements you can rank with your .com domain for different languages.

Yesterday I analysed a webshop that targets different countries (FR, NL, DE, ENG) but doesn't have different domains for each country and I must say that he was ranking for some competitive terms in several languages. If your overall SEO elements are good to target a certain language or country it doesn't matter that much if it is a .fr or .com/fr