Damn I love steam, just decided to buy a game and it is coming down at over 1.5MB/s (yes big B not little b). I don't get why people have such a problem with DD, I can go relax for an hour until my game is ready and I don't have to leave my house...even if I wanted to leave its past 2AM so there is no other way I was getting the game tonight.

DD is an awesome thing...even better when it is from a quality service like steam. I love the digital age!

Steam is a good service, if you don't live in Europe and benefit from Valve's European tax.

Buy it, all of yous!

Fanboy concerns have nothing to do with this: this game takes very little hardware to run and is a fantastic, fantastic puzzler!

What's more likely? That a company that gives away free weekend demos of games, massive free content updates, phenomenal weekend deals like this one, etc...

A) Decided to charge Europeans more in order to give other customers a better price (which is self-defeating since the abused market just stops taking the abuse).

OR

B) Steam is passing on a EU tax levied against them to the consumer thus proving the point that businesses don't pay taxes, consumers do.

I like option B, but I'm certainly biased as I have a high regard for Valve and their customer service.  It could always be option C "something else" but I'd honestly be surprised if it was option A.

You don't understand, before we were paying the US price, to which the VAT was added depending on where the costumer lived. Now thanks to Valve's 1$=1€ convergence rate, we pay more than before.

The VAT is now included in the price, however, we have no idea how much we are paying, seeing that the prices are the same, but each country has a different VAT, people from Norway suffer the most, because they don't have VAT for digital distributed goods, but still have to pay.

Let's take a few example's:

Left 4 Dead

US $49.99

UK £26.99=$38.19

EU 44,99€=$56.55

The Orange Box

US $29.99

UK £16.99=$24.04

EU 29,99€=$37.70

Dead Space

US $39.99

UK not available

EU 44,99€=$56.55

Before you say this is the fault of EA, I can get this from Direct2Drive for £19.95=$28,23.

There are some games that are cheaper for Europeans, like say Beyond Good and Evil, but for the grand majority we pay the most. Also, most games are more expensive than retail as well.

i neeed a credit card... now! :)

i didn't know this game was multiplatform.

Well implementing a tax that is a nightmare to enforce in online transactions is just inviting online stores to do this.  Correct me if I'm wrong but the tax liability is with the business so if they sell to some guy in france who tells them he is in Norway they are obligated to pay the taxes and short of going after the guy for less cash than a 5 minute consult with their legal council they are stuck with it...in short it invites a major hassle and sounds like a surefire way to hemorrage cash.

There best protection from it is to not give people the opportunity to screw them over.  Luckily in many cases you can now buy at retail and attach your game to your steam account, I highly recommend it if the price difference is an issue.

Im loving Steam, did anybody buy Lost Planet last weekend for only $5? I did and I love it

They could do this before, but now it's become a problem?

Before this mess, you lived in Romania you had 19% added to the price, lived in UK, 17.5%, etc.

To check a users location Steam uses IP address, physical address, plus bank account.

You're reasoning can be reduced to "Let's not give a minority a chance to screw us, let's screw everybody".

My number one reason for using Steam was that the prices were cheaper than in retail stores, that reason is no more.

Luckily it would appear that the EU is looking into the online shopping business, so something good might happen in the near future.

Yeah, I can usually get good speed from Steam as well. I'm in Japan and when I was dl'ing L4D(50% off sale :) ) I was dl'ing it at about 9-10MB/s (yes big B). The same for demo's and stuff as well.

World of Goo is an excellent game. I'm loving it so far (I'm most of the way through the first area). I'll play some more tonight :)