Pricewatch!

Originally Posted by Demiath
Stopping the large-scale, organized sale of used games (known collectively as "GameStop", lest we kid ourselves) seems on balance to be a very good thing indeed, but it's also worth mentioning that delaying a game from getting cracked a few days is much more important than seems to be implied by the quote above. The desire to get a game as early as possible is one of the driving forces behind the whole piracy industry, and effectively making the pirated releases day-and-date with the legal copies has been a significant recent development which would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.

I have no problem with something that puts a dent in sales for Gamestop. The issue is private owners like you and I not being able to sell our games if we wanted.

Steam has zero effect on Gamestop though. Like Gorath mentioned, their business is console games. They don't give a rats ass about PC sales.

I agree the delay Steam has on piracy is important, but I think it tends to be overstated sometimes. I think the vast majority of people who pirate games would rather end up waiting those few extra days than actually paying for it.

Originally Posted by Fnord
I don't know how it is in the rest of the world, but if it is anything like here, then I don't understand why people even buy their (used) games at GameStop. Not when I can buy the same games new somewhere else, for less.

Absolutely agree. I've never understood why anyone would buy used titles from Gamestop, especially when they're often in very poor condition.

For that matter, I don't get why anyone would be dumb enough to sell their used games there either.

why would gamestop care about pc sales? while i agree with the loathing for gamestop, its nearly all stores that have abandoned pc sales. also don't forget that gamestop bought out impluse, not saying i'm happy about that but my love for stardock has waned through the years anyhow, so they must care something about the revenue they are losing out to succesful digital distributers like steam and gamersgate.

also i know lots of you love gog.com but in my view they do exactly what gamestop does with used games. sell old stuff, mostly that i already own for inflated prices, and most importantly not supporting the release of new content and hence people who actually have jobs presently and creating. its true they do add great support and make games available to many who never had the opportunity but until they release something i don't already have and actually want i'm still an outsider to the digital distribution koolaid capital of the world.

Deus Ex HR is 75% off on Gamer's gate.

That's a great deal. Recommended.

Originally Posted by Fnord
And in regards to steam & piracy, I thought whatever system steam uses had been beaten a long time ago. Heck, Skyrim was on torrent sites BEFORE it had been officially released.

In Skyrim's case the game was only available before the official release because the Steam preload (and the release version) of Skyrim contained a totally Steam-/DRM-free TESV.exe. You could 2x click the exe and start Skyrim without Steam which was not intended. Without this mistake it probably would have taken the usual day or two before a cracked TESV.exe would have been available.

With all the Steam debates I lost track if this was mentioned, but as a reminder (for those in Amazon territory) that Divinity II DKS is on sale for $5.99 … matching the lowest price ever apparently.

Nice! Another price find. Keep em coming

Hmmmm. Tempting! But I want a hardcopy with a printed manual….

Originally Posted by Thrasher
Hmmmm. Tempting! But I want a hardcopy with a printed manual….

My reply to that is always:

Do you buy music for the album art or the album? Telling me how you want a box, printed manual that is 5 pages long with 3 of them disclaimers, and a physical disk that is useless because of online activation … is album art.

I want the music, the game, the content of the book.

If you are passing up playing a game you want to play because of album art, I would say buy the 'music' digitally now, and look for a bargain on the album art later.

DKS actually has a decent printed manual. It's 38 pages, not including credits. Nothing particularly special about it though.

There is an Activision sale over at GOG right now. This includes the Krondor series.
http://www.gog.com/en/news/selection…n_games_50_off

New sales this week on Steam…

Bioshock 1&2 - $9.99 each

Mafia - $4.99
Mafia II - $14.99

Civilization IV Complete Edition - $14.99
Civilization V GotY Edition - $24.99

Sid Meier's Pirates - $4.99

Duke Nukem Forever - $9.99

Borderlands GotY Edition -$7.49 (today only)

I have a slight logic problem :

Originally Posted by Fnord
I still believe that one of the main reasons why companies are linking their retail copies to steam is because it prevents re-sale of that game

Originally Posted by Demiath
Stopping the large-scale, organized sale of used games (known collectively as "GameStop"

Originally Posted by JDR13
Steam has zero effect on Gamestop though. Like Gorath mentioned, their business is console games. They don't give a rats ass about PC sales.

Gamestop was mentioned several times (if I remember correctly) in interviews on the topic of how evil selling used games is.

So, what I don't quite understand why Steam (which is PC only, no ?) is used as a means to prevent sales of used games, if Gamestop doesn't sell any used PC games anymore ?

Originally Posted by txa1265
My reply to that is always:

Do you buy music for the album art or the album? Telling me how you want a box, printed manual that is 5 pages long with 3 of them disclaimers, and a physical disk that is useless because of online activation … is album art.

I want the music, the game, the content of the book.

If you are passing up playing a game you want to play because of album art, I would say buy the 'music' digitally now, and look for a bargain on the album art later.

There was a time when the art was equally important. That was the Vinyl Age.

Nowadays, it really doesn't matter much anymore, I agree.

But to be that's simply another sign of the degredation of music and art combined - music has been stripped off everything that surrounds it, especially everything art. It has become a simple "ware" like anything else now.

While GameStop don't sell used PC-games, there are others that do. GAME does (for about 50-200% more than the game would cost new, so I don't see why you would buy used games from them), and you can also pick up used games on Amazon or Play.

Aha, okay, I see it now.

Regarding the question why there aren't any retail steamless versions of the same game sold at steam, I have come to this thought : Could it be tht the "terms and conditions" of Steam require that ALL specimens of the game have to be actiavated via Steam, be it retail or online ? That it doesn't matter to them whether a game is sold via retail or not ?

There are actually many titles sold on Steam that have non-steam retail versions. Although pretty much any games released recently seem to require Steam regardless of media.

Hm, thank you, this explains it a bit for me.

On GOG.com Selection of Activision Games 50% off, including Betrayal at Krondor and its sequel; here's the link:
http://www.gog.com/en/news/selection…n_games_50_off.

Regarding Satinav's Chains : I have found an (German-language) article containing a statement by Daedalic on Golem : http://www.golem.de/news/daedalic-zu…202-89864.html

They basically say that they need Steam for international sales.

But the article implicitely also sheds some light in the rules determining whether Steam accepts games or not :

"A New Beginning und Edna Bricht Aus haben sie nach dreimaliger Vorstellung mit der Begründung abgelehnt, dass ihre Zielgruppe das Spiel nicht interessiert."

My translation : "A New Beginning and Edna Breaks Out have been presented three times, and they have been rejected with the reason that their target group isn't interested in these games."

As far as I know, this is one of the few occations when we actually learn a little bit about the reasons why games are rejected at Steam or not.

I don't know what the lowest common denominator between these two games and all other Steam games is, but my suggestion is that both adventure games are too much story-driven and too much head-driven (thinking - puzzles) for the Steam folks.

I guess (and this is nothing but a guess right now) that Steam prefers to sell games with at least a little bit of "action" in it. But that's just a guess.

Adventure games usually don't have much action in tzem, but instead they are much more "thought-oriented" and "slow-paced" and contain a strong story, usually.

What begins to worry is that through this "pre-selection" Steam is kind of funelling the amount of "visible" games. This is a little bit like Google, which is funnelling the "real web" into something they believe the customer should see (and what the customer should not see). Steam works - in the end - a little bit like that.

Bioshock 1 and 2 are $5 each on Steam.