Valve Details Upcoming Improvements for Steam

[AnUnusedUsername]

@secolliyn

The 49.99 cost in retail stores doesn't go to overhead either, beyond the minor costs of shipping and packaging, which are probably approximately equal to the overhead associated with steam. Games cost so much because we don't know how to fund developers without charging for the copies that cost nothing to make. Its not an ideal system, but the alternative is some sort of development tax, which no one is interested in.

Steam is great for prices for games on sale, I haven't ever bought anything from steam that wasn't on sale, since you get an actual product if you buy retail, and can usually activate it on steam anyway. Retail games don't ever go on sale for some reason, so steam serves that purpose well.


...I don't like having to retype my reply because the submit button won't post it if I login through the popup window.

 

[jimmysmitty]

[citation][nom]schmich[/nom]Good. Now how about reducing the prices on games on Steam? Especially your own ones Steam. In Switzerland it's cheaper to buy a Valve game retail than on Steam...quite the scam really when they don't have any middle man cost, no material cost, no packaging cost and no delivery cost except minor bandwidth.[/citation]

VALVe has no control over pricing in stores. A lot of stores will undercut Steam to make more sales, which is normal. The price you see is the price that it is set to be at on Steam but as said, some places will sell for a lower profit to sell more than Steam does. That happened with Portal 2.

 

[steelbox]

Besides, Steam does not set the prices all by them selfs. Also there is the case where game dealer where not accepting distributing games if their digital equivalent was too much cheaper. Schmich, if the prices where, let say 30% cheaper on Steam, would you bother going all the way to your local game dealer to buy there? Now every body do that and every game dealer will cease selling PC games.

 

[techseven]

[citation][nom]tjf311[/nom]@techsevenYou can already do that using the 3rd party app Game Save Manager 2[/citation]

There are already several ways to do it, but I want something hassle-free and native to the Steam client...

 

[chrisjust98]

[citation][nom]secolliyn[/nom]I don't really agree with you yes their sales are great and now that they have a different sale everyday I have bought more games from them but take for instance Homefront still a new game and it's being sold on STEAM for 49.99 guess what the price is at Gamestop, Bestbuy, Target or any other retailer that when you bought it you would get a nice box a manual and a DVD that's right 49.99 not it being digital we all know that there is not overhead for making the box, manual, DVD ect so pass that savings on to the customer I mean it just makes scene your not getting as much when you buy it in retail[/citation]

You do realize that Valve isn't the only one that decides how much the games are, right? The publisher of the game ultimately has the last word.

And FYI, Homefront was on sale for like half price sometime during their summer sale. I haven't seen that anywhere else. But then again, I don't look anywhere else to buy games most of the time.

 

[alextheblue]

[citation][nom]techseven[/nom]Nice, sensible improvements to an already great service... I just hope they will soon allow installing on more than 1 hard drive, like if you want to utilize your ssd only for a limited selection of games...[/citation]
Yeah. There's a lot of older games that don't need the speed of the primary drive, that I'd like to shove on a storage drive. I guess I could just uninstall them and only download them when I want to play them... but that's a bit of a hassle and sucks up their bandwidth as well as mine.