After a bit of love from me to Steam, here's the hate.

Call of Duty 4 is out for the PC but it's yet to be released on the Steam platform, that as been accepting pre-orders since November 6.

Myself being Portuguese, the price I get when browsing the Steam webpage is quite different from most of you that live in the US.




Using wicked hacking skill, I changed the two last characters of the URL from PT to EN, and I was greet by the real price of the game.




Of course this is the lighter side of the thing, as I still have to add 21% of TAX to these prices to understand how much would I really pay for the game.
This is the path I take every time I wish to purchase games from Steam, as they're normally cheaper than the retail ones in my country.
After some calculations, I visit XE.com to get the price in Euros.

Most of the games sold in Steam maintain their price for whatever country they're sold in.

This is how much it costs on Steam in the Americas.




This is how much it costs on Steam outside the Americas.




This is how much it costs at retail in Portugal.




So, in conclusion, do they expect people to pay even more for a game which doesn't contain a box nor a CD?

This is not the first time that happened. I had the same problem with BioShock.




Of course, my only conflict with this one was that I wasn't getting it as cheap as I was expecting from a digital copy.






But back to nag about Activision and their lousy deal, why are they doing this?
I'm talking of an independent, the first actually, video game developer and publisher. All they get is profit out of their own franchises, not having to share revenue with publishers.

VALVe receives some share of the sells made on Steam from other developers' products. But I don't believe it's that much to justify a different price, also because the price is higher outside the Americas and doesn't even offer any physical copy of the games.

So, Activision, go grind open some other's asshole, Okay? Bye thanks.

-CL