Report: Steam Allows Publishers To Crack Down On Cross-Region Gifting

[Fdzzaigl]

Of course changing from Euros to dollars is free and in case it has escaped your notice there is remote risk that the Euro wont exist in few months time. This risk has to be insured against which cost money. GoG is european based site and includes vat in upfront prices and when they sell to a non vat country they keep the additional money for themselves.

The bolded part is just a silly thing to say.

Regardless of VAT, 1$ =\= 1?.
Steam also enforces a flat VAT while in reality the rates differ widely and some countries don't even have VAT on internet transactions at all.

At the moment of writing 1 euro = 1.36730 USD.
A ?49,99 game would therefore be $68,35.
While a $49,99 game with a maximum VAT tax of 25% would be $62,48, as stated before, the difference would be much bigger in the case of many other countries in europe.

In the end, publishers set these prices because they can, and that's that.

 

[RicoADF]

The legal issues such as Australian Laws governing violence which limits the amount of violence. If the laws exist and the Australian government hold steam liable

Australian classification law has nothing to do with it, they only cover retail sales. DLC, digital sales and 'apps' aren't restrained by it, also even the games that are refused classification or get edited are still legal to buy and import, and since Steam is an American distribution service based in the states it basically falls in that category. I guess if they have servers located here then there'd be an argument on that, but then they would have to accept foreign cd keys to allow imports (Australian government actually encourages the gray market/importing to circumvent price gouging).