The Age of Steam

[thiosk]

When i bought HL2 on the day of release, I wanted to scream as the update process for steam took about 5 hours on top of the 2 hour install with a brand new computer.

I was really, really pissed off. Like really.

Time went on, life continued. I shelved valve for nearly 4 years until L4D came out, I installed the game, and logged back onto my old steam account. Gone was the slowness, and low and behold, there was HL2 and all the goodies it came with waiting to be installed by me. I lost the 5 CDs for HL2 a long time ago, and had given it up for gone.

Since then, I have become a lover of steam, especially when I went home for christmas and logged in from a laptop, installing many new games without having to bring any software.

As a result, I am now buying about 80% of all games direct from steam, any problems have been vastly outweighed by portability and convenience.

As far as the currency issue goes, I'm very upset I cannot purchase Steam products with gold or silver. THE CONSTITUTION SAYS ITS LEGAL TENDER ZOMG

 

[Lord Krunk]

Why didn't you mention that EU market gets not ignored, but screwed over by Valve?

How else could we call prices at least 30% higher than in US?

Don't ever come to Australia then.

I love Steam, mainly because it's the only reasonably priced store in Australia. Seriously, I'm not forking over $120 for a game, no matter how good it is.

 

[Zer_]

Guess why they get a Weekend Deal every week? It's not because the developer is setting those prices 50% lower than normally. It's because THEY set those prices so low.

While I am in no way going to dispute that prices vary from country to country (I pay more than an American customer because my Canadian (CDN) dollars have to be exchanged for American (USD) dollars before I can purchase a game on Steam and with the current exchange rate that means I pay more), this quote is false.

I assume the "they" in this stands for Steam & Valve. This is incorrect, the other publishers have to sign a contract with Steam to have their game on Steam services and not all games have in their contract that there can be special deals on them. Those special deal weekends you see? Those were carefully negotiated with the content providers. Early on with Steam, the only games that had special deals were exclusively Valve games and this was probably so they could prove to the other publishers that offering deals on their service would increase sales of that game.

I just had a very similar conversation about Steam with regards to Mass Effect and how it doesn't have the automatic patches to the game - you still have to go to somewhere else, prove you purchased the game, and manually do it. And a few days before that a conversation about how another EA game was very slow and didn't finish to download. In both these cases it was because the publisher of that game was deciding how much they would support that game on Steam, with regards to content servers. And with that in mind, you think the publisher doesn't control the price on Steam as well?

Also, keep in mind that in the world of banking, Steam has to strike a deal with someone to manage the finances of those purchases and different banks around the world provide those services. If you want prices in your local country, ask yourself if any of your banks offer the kinds of services to provide for Steam account purchases and if the your country has laws and taxes that are favourable to Steam doing business there with said banks. I know I would welcome not having to do a currency exchange to purchase a game on Steam, here is hoping they could strike a deal with one of our Canadian banks.

This man speaks the truth. Local banks may have an influence on your local pricing with online purchases.

 

[scarbunny]

For the majority of consumers Steam is easy to use, and offers no restrictions of much consequence (Steam is happy to let me have access to all my games even when I'm nowhere near anywhere with internet access) and offers social networking/group features which pirate games don't. And although I'm personally not a fan of iTunes it has a huge back catalog and offers seamless integration with any iPod products, and 7 Digital offers DRM free and no limit on the no. of downloads or from which location.

All in all, the 3 services I mention offer more then Pirate sites (except for the price of course), I simply think that consumers are shifting to a mindset where they believe they are paying for what we call 'extras', i.e. the social networking, software integration, and limitless access and see the core product of almost no value. As piracy nets you the core product which many are happy with, but enough consumers are happy to pay for the extra content.

Fairy Nuff.

However in my personal view the added value features have very little value. If I want social networking I'll use Facebook for free, not that I want social networking generaly as it is the devils spawn, Media Player does a damn fine job of sync-ing my music to my MP3 player and is free, and if I really wanted I could download anything any where for free from a pirate site (not that I do that sort of thing any more but the fact remains I could)

However my main issue with Steam in general isnt really related to with value added features it to do with the actual product and the price that is charged. I recently bought Dawn Of War 2 from HMV limited steel book edition for £22, Steam on the other hand is charging £34.99 no amount of social networking or ease of multiplayer is worth £12, not to me at least your mileage may vary.

 

[John Funk]

Don't forget that there's pressure from retail stores to keep digital download prices higher than shelf price. The retailers will threaten to reduce the amount they order from the publisher, or even remove it from the shelves entirely. This isn't too big a consideration if it's just a small store, but for one of the larger chains (like Best Buy or Target) the number can be pretty significant. Steam sales, while becoming more popular, are still smaller relative to retail store sales, so the publishers can't afford the risk, especially if they have other titles that can't be delivered by digital methods that can be threatened.

This is why you'll see it at higher price on Steam, and then special deals being offered to bring it closer to the expected retail price, or sometimes beat it. They're appeasing the retail outlets with the higher digital price, and then trying to circumvent it under guise of a 'limited time' sale.