Now I have a nifty PC that can run modern games, I’ve been exploring the convenience of the Steam store – PC games that’ll run without having to download a nodvd crack and disable your ability to play them online.
Only I’m in Australia, which means Steam insists on making me pay a penalty for many titles. Take Civilization 5, now taking preorders – they want $US80-90 from us (in US currency, bizarrely), where if they don’t manage to automatically detect your location and think you’re in the US the price is $US50-60. That’s right, we’re paying almost double for NOTHING. They don’t ship anything here, they don’t have any increased costs, the Australian distributor is not involved – so what the hell is the justification for robbing us blind? They’re even charging MORE than in the shops, for less – no packaging, no distribution, no middle men costs, but prices at retail level Australian dollar figures with the currency changed to the more expensive US dollars.
And whether we just blame the publishers for being discriminatory parasites, or assign some blame to Valve for giving them the tools to do it, the situation is both offensive and absurd.
Do they REALLY think we’re going to cop it? Do they REALLY think we’re going to pay double for no reason? Do they REALLY think that people who are considering handing over money are going to just bend over and take being ripped off so outrageously? There’s a reason Australia is known for high levels of piracy, and THIS SORT OF GARBAGE IS IT.
Screw you, Steam. Screw you, Valve. Most importantly – Screw you, publishers. If you’re going to treat your paying customers like this you deserve to lose sales to piracy.
If you have an IP product and you
- refuse to sell it to people in certain countries;
- refuse to sell it for particular periods;
- refuse to sell it in particular formats;
- insist on adding anti-consumer garbage like DRM that limits paying customers’ access to the content for which they’ve paid;
- charge some customers more than others;
- charge unreasonable amounts for content
…Then you do not deserve the protection of OUR courts, OUR governments. IP is not an intrinsic natural law, it’s something we the public grant you in order to encourage you to create. If you’re not going to live up to your end of the bargain, and enable us to access those created works reasonably, then why should we live up to ours? Why should we send the police we pay for to chase after your imaginary “property” rights? Why should we respect them at all?
I will NEVER buy a download game (such as via Steam) at a higher price than they’ll sell it to an American customer. NEVER. I may try to work around the restriction by using a US paying account and a US proxy, but if that doesn’t work I will not buy it at all. THEY WILL GET NONE OF MY MONEY. There is ZERO chance of me paying them more for less.
Get stuffed, you discriminatory arseholes.
ELSEWHERE: What a publisher that’s thinking straight does about “piracy”.
Tags: Australia, digital downloads, piracy, ripoffs, Steam
I guess they’ve made several decisions here. They’ve noted a drop in in-store sales due to Steam. So they’ve either decided to “correct” the pricing (ignoring that their overhead is less for digital distribution versions) to “compensate”, or to push some people back to in-store purchases.
It’s also notable that other Civ games are cheap on steam – always have been, to the best of my knowledge. So it’s not the usual blanket increase of Steam prices to “match” Australian retail prices like some companies seem to have done, so much as a specific change to “combat” cheaper steam sales eating into their first-fortnight sales figures for a game.
I’ll bet you’d find, too, that those drop in sales figures are NOT made up by Steam sales – that the distributers have nothing to do with the Steam sales in their region, that this is never factored in, so instead of looking like an overall increase in profit for a region, it looks like an overall decrease in sales figures – and I’ll bet you sales figures are more important in their bar charts and quarterly reports than income – from a specific title, at least.
You always hear about X number of copies shipped with games, and then Y dollars profit for the whole company.
Indeed. The fact is that digital content should be cheaper than retail because:
(a) the consumer loses their right to onsell the content;
(b) there are no packaging costs
(c) there are not transport costs (or negligible costs)
(d) there are much smaller middle-men costs.
None of the arguments for why Australian retail should be so expensive have ever made sense to me – so what if we’re a “smaller market”? The product is the same. In most cases, it’s coming from the same place – China. Why should we be gouged?
The existence of international stores like Steam just makes the ripoff more obvious.
Ah well. They can do without my money then.
I uninstalled Steam from my computer a couple of years ago, and it’s not coming back.
It wasn’t the rip offs that bothered me (because I didn’t ever buy anything from their store), it was the automatic updates that kept breaking my years old install of HalfLife 2.
It seems to me that this particular topic seems to flow back that what you guys discussed with Blunty3000. They`re probably raising their prices in order to gain a profit equal to the United States. But I do agree that that is complete bullshit.
Unfortunately I can`t be as true to the “cause” as Kinsley because I need Steam to play my hard copy of Dawn of War.
I almost went and bought the Civ4 bundle on Steam last weekend, with the idea that I’d sell my Civ4 Complete and Colonization DVDs. But no store will buy them – and I’m glad, in retrospect, that I’ll keep a copy that isn’t subject to the whims of whoever ends up running Steam oppressively in the future.
I can agree with that. I have an Ubisoft game from the Heroes of Might and Magic series, and its old enough to not be connected to Ubisoft`s idiotic severs. So when the system is inevitable stopped, my copy won`t be affected.
On the steam oppression note, do you think that they`ll implement legal action to prevent fascism in the DRM operations and pricing, or are we doomed to be under the thumb of the corporations?
Under the thumb. The corporations have the money and the organisation to get what they want.
My laptop doesn’t have a DVD drive. It is ludicrous that I cannot install games I own to the thing without using a no-DVD crack sourced from a dodgy pirate site. Making your customers use a crack to get their game to work? NOT a strong encouragement for them to avoid piracy.
Well that sucks major balls that you have to resort to pirate websites. i play most of my games on consoles, so I dont have the same problems as a PC gamer does. But the one thing that really pisses me off about what the PC market does is that they`ve limited the number of installations for a game to one.
I was talking to my friend about this a while ago, and she did make a valid point about it prevent piracy, but could you please at least make the limit 2 or 3 at the very least. I man, what happens when your computer`s motherboard goes ca-put? You`re screwed because in order to play, say Half Life2, again you need to go and buy the damn game again. I mean who the hell is making up all these ridicules ideas and policies. I mean dear god its only a matter of time until we have something like with the Armored Core games, where the corporations rule the world and we`re fucked either way.
“Unfortunately I can`t be as true to the “cause” as Kinsley because I need Steam to play my hard copy of Dawn of War.”
Heh. I really can’t take any credit there, because in the end I just gave up. Instead of upgrading my computer to the latest and greatest, I bought a PS3.
Mind you, I’m not getting into the habit of paying full price for PS3 games. I wait for sales. I don’t mind if that means waiting three or four years to pick up a title.
Do you still game on PC Kinsley? I mean, with the few no DRM games out there?
Well, I’ve still got a ton of PC games, and I still play them from time to time. I think Civ IV is the newest. But an old Pentium IV only gets you so far these days.
I’m getting sick of being gouged by MS – eg on the Valve games, free add-ons suddenly cost $10 on 360.
Yes well, that`s the gaming world we live in. Failure is everywhere, decent games are as rare as a purple drop, and the corporations OWN our gaming asses for what its worth.
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