Great games blog

Time for another whinge about the ripoff pricing that Steam continues to inflict on Australian buyers.

The last time was back in March. Steam was pricing Fallout New Vegas at the extreme price of 90 US dollars, while charging US consumers $49.99 US. Even with the high Aussie dollar then (and now) the cost to Aussies was far more than US gamers are paying, and only marginally better than the cost of a box at EB Games.

Well, Steam is at it again with the long awaited Duke Nukem Forever. Compare. First we have the price from Direct2Drive.

Now we have the price from Steam for DNF.

Once again Steam is happy to rip off it’s Australian customers. And I thought digital distribution was supposed to be cheaper.

I tell you what, Steam is rapidly losing my confidence. I used to think they were a great service, even the DRM side of things didn’t really bother me as it was fairly unobtrusive. And I do like their sales, it’s hard to find cheaper games. But it’s unlikely I’ll use them for any AAA games again, their overpricing for Aussie gamers is simply wrong. Looks like it’s Direct2Drive for me.

Steam Pricing Ripoff

Game developer Valve’s co-founder Gabe Newell talked in a recent interview about a good place for retro games nowadays, their online game download service Steam. Over 13 million Steam users seem to agree. To quote Mr. Newell’s own impression:

“Retail doesn’t know how to deal with those games. On Steam there’s no shelf-space restriction. It’s great because they’re a bunch of old, orphaned games. They’re games I want to play. The day we turned on the Team Fortress 2 beta I was sat in my office playing Quake 1, saying, “Hey, this is great!” I’d never had been able to find my original Quake discs, they are long, long gone. But it shows up on Steam and I can start playing.”

When Mr. Newell asked if he expects more retro games to show up, he gives the surprising answer that he wants every game ever made on Steam!

Question: And you expect more old games to show up?
Answer: Oh yeah, I expect we’ll go back in time and eventually pretty much every game that’s ever been available will be on there 24/7.

Question: Old LucasArts games?
Answer: Sure, those are some great games. I mean there are some real problems, where the waters are muddied and companies have gone out of business. That makes things difficult.
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