Making it pretty much a wash in my book. Which leaves the fact that the costs on their end are substantially less and thus I should be getting cut in on at least some of the resulting savings. And I’m mostly not.

Same here, bought it retail for about $40.

If the price is nearly identical, steam is ALWAYS my first choice, but sadly not this time.

My original point was simply meant to illustrate another online distribution service which sometimes charges significantly more than the retail channel.

Ultimately no ones forcing people to buy games through Steam, esp if the prices are over inflated by the Publisher. Should Valve start stepping in and telling publishers what to charge in their digital shop? Sounds like a swift recipe for losing other publishers from the venture forever. However when the suits at Activision puzzle over why their Steam sales of CoD4 panned in Europe, I’m sure they will ponder the wisdom of going for different pricing options. A market is best decided upon by market forces and supply and demand.

Would I have like to have CoD4 on Steam, yes. Was I prepared to get ripped off, no. What did I do? Bought a retail copy. Simple really.

Valve made the CHOICE to allow this product to be available through thier system.

Even if they are only the distributer, they are still part of the equation.

Unless you’re buying from the EA store, like this story is about, anyway.

The thing is, the price of something with no real manufacturing cost in a market has nothing to do with currency exchange rates.
At all.
Forget them.
It’s all about what you can get people to pay, usually based on precedent. New games on the PC were £29.99 a decade ago and have been creeping up slower than inflation. £40 is entirely reasonable given the pricing history.
New games in the US are $50. Can’t speak for history there, but I don’t think they’ve gone up dramatically recently, and certainly haven’t come down.

Online stores obviously can undercut retail because they don’t have the infrastructure to maintain, and digital downloads are usually priced to match local retail so as not to piss-off the retailers.

No mystery.

Are you nuts? About 35 – 50% of a retail sale goes to the retailers, not the publishers. so on a £30 retail game, the publishers maybe make £10 – 15, from which they deduct the cost of the packaging, DVD production, printing of the manual, shipping etc, so knock off a couple of quid and cost of production. On a download sale the profit it all theirs and the expenditure far less. One would expect at the minimum that the DD prices are comparable Vs the retail prices, but in the EA store the prices are actually much higher than the retail equivilant. Minor quibbles about other publishers Steam pricing aside, generally on Steam a new game price is pretty favourable compared to the retail release, and with Steam you don’t get charged for redownloading games. To make it out that EA by deigning to do DD at a considerable mark up is them (the worlds biggest games publisher) doing the DD seeking customer a favour is absurd. Amazon will deliver anything over £15 for free to your front door/workplace wherever and still charge you about £13 less than EA DD does.

@ The_Mhor: Ah yes, the old three installs only DRM. I’m hoping that’ll get patched out, à la Bioshock, particularly as I’ll be upgrading soonish but I’m not counting on it.