I am a big fan of the “Total War” series and the 4 march 2009 the newest addition to the family was published, Empire: Total War. The quickest and easiest way for me to obtain the game would be by buying and downloading the game directly from within steam, but for some strange reason the prices are much higher than the retail price including DVD’s, booklets and such.
50 EUR – Download from steam.
35 EUR – DVD’s and booklets from danish web shop including shipping.
I do not really care for the future of steam but it saddens me to see their potential being wasted like this. I would love to get rid of the silly DVD’s and have the game on the day it was released but since the price for this option is so high I do not mind the delivery and the sound of my noise DVD-drive.
Logically the steam price should be lower since they have close to zero distribution costs beside server running costs, doesn’t have to print DVD’s, booklets or compete with a retailer for a cut of the profit.
Further reading
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/100759-13-steam-pricing
http://forums.indiegamer.com/showthread.php?t=15310
In general, I am quite satisfied with how Steam works and the convenience of getting my games and keeping them maintained. It strikes me as very odd, that they have been so grossly incompetent when choosing their pricing scheme.
I stumbled to this page totally by accident but I have to comment that, despite popular belief, as far as I know neither Valve nor Steam do the pricing on any other titles than what they publish themselves. All other titles from all other publishers are priced by the publisher and they propably dont want to (or cannot due to distribution contracts???) sell the game cheaper to one distributor compared to another.
That might be true but they didn’t equalize euros and dollars which rather insane considering the low value of the dollar.
Steam announcement, dated Dec. 17:
Products on Steam are now priced using local currency in the United Kingdom (Pounds Sterling), and Europe (Euros). All other countries remain in United States Dollars.
I guess Steam does not really want to sell games.
oh well, but thankfully there are alternatives. There are many CD key selling websites that have good prices. One of such is NoobKeys.com
Me and my buddy got Left 4 Dead and Call of duty 4 for dirt cheap. Under $30 USD. I don’t know how they do it, but I have found no complaints and several other of my friends have gotten other games too.
I asked the admin and he said they will provide more steam games by late April 2009.