Here is Sweden Skyrim was significantly cheaper retail than on Steam. IIRC 300 SEK versus around 450. I was all set to buy it via Steam until I saw that.
Not a rant against Steam, mind. I am a reformed PC gamer after years of console gaming (I still console game but the increasingly buggy nature of console games as consoles get more complex, along with online subscription models and the delay in getting updates out whilst they are OK’d by Sony or MS - ignoring Nintendo as they can’t update at all - is seriously turning me off) and I think Steam is just fantastic. If nothing else, for the periodic sales. I have bought games dirt cheap that I will maybe play in the future, they were just too cheap to pass up. Mass Effects 1 and 2 for less than 100 SEK each, for example.
Bottom, line, Steam is the reason why we now have the likes of Cliffy B telling developers to go PC and forget consoles.
Why EA’s most expensive game is a PC exclusive. Why devs like the Borderland 2 devs write love letters to PC gamers telling them how they aren’t just making port of a console game, but are instead tailoring the experience to the PC.
Steam has made inroads into what used to be entire pirate communities, such as Russia. It’s brought PC gaming into everyone’s mind.
And ultimately, the annoyance factor for someone not at all interested in it is minimal. The client can be made fairly transparent.
So I don’t get the OP. For something so insignificant he’s willing to give up playing an amazing game. Your 1 minute of annoyance at installing Steam and configuring it to be more transparent to you, would have been made up a thousand fold delving deep into a single ancient dwarven city in the game. Easily.
Steam doesn’t exist in a vacuum. If it wasn’t for steam I wouldn’t be surprised if Skyrim would never even have made it on PC at all.
All right, dude. You’re really crossing over into fantasy land here.
Cliff’s Epic abandoned the PC long ago and won’t be back. Steam is not why an MMO launched on the PC. Gearbox’s PC letter was due to terrible reception their first game had on the platform ('cause they didn’t focus on the PC version and won’t again.) Steam hasn’t done anything to reduce piracy. PC gaming is less popular (as a proportion of all gaming) than ever.
Steam is easily at least as annoying as iTunes and gamers effin’ hate iTunes, so irony 'n fanboyism there. In fact, Steam is probably more annoying then iTunes since it’s more in-your-face to start with.
Cliffy B’s company is also working on a PC EXCLUSIVE game. Talk about abandoning the paltform!
Steam is not the sole reason EA put out the most expensive game ever on the “less popular” Pc platform, but it was Steam that showed devs and publishers that PC gaming can be extremely profitable if you approach it correctly.
Steam has done a LOT to reduce piracy. Including streamlining localization of titles, one of the reasons why Russia, who used to pretty much only pirate,has become one of their most lucrative territories. The services they provide including the amazing PC centric titles valve puts out have also helped bring people into Steam as paying customers.
As for PC being less popular… where? In the States, Japan and the UK, probably, but even there the PC represents a significant portion of the market. And in Asia and Eastern Europe, it represents the larger share.
And of course, like every other console gamer who makes the same tired argument, you forget that you are comparing three different platforms to a single one.
My understanding is that Steam doesn’t “buy” the game its selling you until you purchase it from them. Or else they buy in very small blocks. When Steam has a sale, it’s negotiated with the publisher. Steam can’t just knock 40% off a price unilaterally because of this.
This is different from how a store does it where they buy a bunch of product and then can sell them for as much or little as they want since they own all the boxes. Even Amazon and Green Man Gaming and similar download services buy blocks of retail keys to sell (you see that if you activate an Amazon bought game on Steam, it’ll say “retail”).
Sometimes Steam’s sales are very very good, other times it pays to shop around.
Yes, but the usual mentality is that a digital product is cheaper than a physical product as it requires less overhead (transport, physical location, physical product and with associated printing costs, purchasing of stock in advance …).
If I wasn’t been clear, I was talking about the prices on launch day.
Regardless of whether it costs more to produce or buy, physical retailers (and those who buy bulk lots of retail keys) can price it at whatever they want. If they want to price it at their cost or even as a loss-leader on launch day, they can. Steam lacks that flexibility; they’re selling it for a negotiated price between them and the publisher. There might be something with the exchange rates as well. I know foreign users bitch on the Steam forums regularly about pricing issues.
I’m not defending Steam (I bought my copy of Skyrim from GMG), just explaining why you may find better pricing elsewhere.
From my experience just about anything is cheaper on release in physical stores than on Steam. I was just using Skyrim as an example as that was what was mentioned in the OP. Whatever the reason for this is, it shows to me that the digital prices on Steam are far too high. So high that right now I would not buy a non-sale game on Steam, I’ll instead do what I did with Skyrim, I’ll buy a physical copy that requires a Steam account and pretty much consists of entering a code found in the box that starts a day one patch download.
Hate iTunes, love Steam. I find Steam nowhere near as annoying as iTunes, not even close. Hell, every time iTunes would update, I need to tell it again “Don’t start on PC boot”, but I only have to tell Steam once. The bulk of my games are on Steam, and there is NO WAY IN FUCKING HELL it is “more in-your-face to start with”. And I say this as someone who has been with Steam and with iTunes since some of the earliest versions (though I’ve finally cut the iTunes cord thanks to Android).
That’s just the DD market in general. Skyrim released for $60 (US) whether you bought it from Steam, Amazon, GMG or whoever else. People are happy enough with the upsides of digital downloads to not demand a lower price for not having a disk and a box. Especially with Skyrim which was going to sell no matter what so most online outlets didn’t have much incentive to discount it until after the holidays.
Steam (and the rest) offer a value in that, six or twelve months from now, you can get stuff for 50-75% off on a regular basis while the stores have just pulled it off the shelf and replaced it with the latest $60 big title. For new releases, Steam isn’t that great unless you just want the assurance that all your games will be in one library.
My only real issue with Steam is the one account instance active at a time restriction. I have tons of games on Steam, I don’t ask to be able to play the same game at the same time on Steam, I only ask to have the same thing afforded to me I do with physical disks – I can have two games running on two different computers at once.
I owned Plants vs Zombies, my girlfriend wanted to play it. I had Steam games I wanted to play. We had to “take turns” with my Steam account (we weren’t about to buy it again since I owned it). I understand I’m really “buying a license for just ME to use it”, and I understand exactly what kind of shenanigans it’s trying to prevent by having that limitation, but I still wish there was a way I could have just two computers active at once.
All in all, I figured out that you can trick the system with offline mode and some fast fingers, but I didn’t do it because I was worried they had some auto-detection installed since it was a pretty obvious trick.
I’ve got a Home Theater PC and I ended up having to create a separate account for it in order to make gameplay with both computers work.
I only pick up games for the HTPC account when heavily discounted, otherwise, most games are on my main account. The only exception are the 1 or 2 games my wife actually plays (dirt, peggle).