So why do you hate Steam for it? Surely the real problem would be if Valve/ Steam were setting the prices themselves and refusing to allow publishers any leeway.

99p to the EU, £2.35 worldwide- http://help.thehut.com/index.php?sid=146099&lang=en&action=artikel&cat=7&id=40&artlang=en

Ok.. I think there was some kind of miscommunication from my part. I know that publishers set the price for their games, kind of. They agree on how much the publisher gets from a sold game on steam and valve takes some money for the sale, too. They don't decide the price individiually for every region and their cut on the sale does not depend on where the game was sold.

It is the service provider who decides to screw europeans with their pricing.

Sorry, but as far as I'm aware, publishers have absolute control over regional pricing and regional availability- Steam is just the storefront. I've heard of one case where Valve refused to allow an indie game to set too high a price so obviously there are limits into which games have to fit, but that's a completely different thing.

As far as you are aware does not make it so. Neither does my view on the matter, but that is how it usually works. Unless either of us have some facts on that, we just have to agree to disagree on this. Unless you will take my word that few years back you could buy the games with US prices in EU countries. That would support my theory on their way of doing business.

And so does those steam deals. If for example EA decides to discount their games, the discount is not on steam. And when steam has a deal on EA game, the deal is not on EA store.

From what I have seen prices on Steam are fairly mixed ...

Some games seem to have very good prices ($20 for Mass Effect 2) while others seem to be very expensive ($60 for Modern Warfare 2); and with how many games are in my backlog, it is easy to find affordable games to play.

I loved Risen. It took me well over 40 hours to complete.

yeah another pretty bad deal.

Got the game back in December for 9€ from Game.co.uk. 3 months after it came out and it still beats this price by 6€.

Risen comes with a Soundtrack CD and a big manual btw.

man that was a good deal, to get that kind of deal in my country I would have to wait 3 weeks for delivery lol, and it would still be a worse deal than that unless the game was 3 years old.

There was a problem with activation keys apparently (the game uses TAGES on Steam, idiotically). Anyway, one of the Deep Silver reps posted this-

The game sold more copies over the last 4 days than since its release in October 2009 in total(over almost one year)! It's like earning a year's salary in 4 days and that is truly something no one anticipated from our side.

That really is quite amazing.