Review: Dragon Ball Z – Ultimate Tenkaichi (PS3)

When people talk about gaming networks, there is one that seems to rise above them all.  Xbox Live has a great experience, and the PSN is free, and the Wii….well let’s just leave the Wii out of the discussion.  All of these services are great, but when it comes to rolling all these great features into one service, only one stands at the end of the day, and it is Steam.  Steam provides quality online community features, stable and fast online play and an online shop all for free.  Well, you have to buy games in the store, but the service itself is completely free.

Yes, Steam has been a great boon to PC gamers, providing a service that has grown over the years, to be the model for what should be in an online service.  But while Steam is solid and packed to the brim with quality features, I have found that its market holds a dark side that over time has really started to irritate me.  For all the features that I love in Steam, this one feature really kills me, because it keeps me from using Steam as my one stop location for all things PC gaming.

So what could I have against a service that totally caters to the PC market with such reverence?  It all comes down to the pricing that you find in the marketplace.  The Steam marketplace is way too expensive for a downloaded copy of a game that has no packaging or any other insert that came with the packaging.  I have eliminated all of this extra packing and box, yet I pay full price.  Sure there are some good values, like the Eidos pack or the Rockstar pack, but when you look at some of the older catalog, you start to see some issues.

$40, really?

Look at some of these titles and tell me if you see anything that is problematic.  Recently, I talked about buying The Club on the PC for a reduced price of $29.99.  I am seeing this price around town now as the consistent norm, but on Steam, where I wanted to buy the game, it is still $49.99.  Kane and Lynch can be found for the sum of $19.99 at GameStop (it’s still not worth the hassle), but on Steam, I am paying a $20.00 premium at $39.99.  Another good game that I wanted to buy on Steam that I got for a cheaper price at Best Buy is Universe at War.  Why is this game still $49.99 on Steam, when it is $29.99 everywhere else?  I know Universe at War is a good, solid RTS, but it has come down in price everywhere but Steam. 

I am sure that some of the reason behind higher prices on Steam come down to publishers dictating terms to Steam.  I have heard this point brought out several times in the past, but to me, that just means that Steam is not showing them that digital sales will make more for them in the end if they match the prices you see in the real world.  If The Club was $29.99 on Steam right now, I would have bought it there.  I just bought Juiced 2 for $9.90 via an online vendor (yes, I am achievement whoring on the PC), because when I went to buy it on Steam, it was still priced at $39.99, and I think the price is still inflated, because THQ wants to milk it for all it can on Steam.  Publishers know that there are tons of people that buy exclusively on Steam now, and for them, they know that they can dictate a price to these consumers.  Yeah, this is probably more an issue of the competition not challenging Steam enough, but it is also publishers that treat digital distribution with such a different stroke, and Steam in the middle of it, not pushing on either side of the argument.

Valve does try to lead by example on Steam, but releasing The Orange Box on the PC for $5.00 cheaper if you pre-ordered it, but still I was asked to pay virtually the same price as the boxed version on the shelves, even thought my copy of The Orange Box did not come in a plastic clamshell case, with a plastic liner, manual inserts and a paper cover wrap.  All of those extra packaging items should have resulted in a discount on The Orange Box, but it did not.  I paid the same as everyone else, and it really rubbed me the wrong way.

Can Steam fix this problem?  I think it is possible.  First they need to do a better job, cutting the prices significantly on their own products that are on Steam from day one.  I would love to see all Valve products be $10 cheaper when it is a $50 game, on Steam.  It might be some incentive to show other companies what you have to do to sell better via digital distribution.  Steam also needs to better negotiate price drops on the Steam marketplace.  I know the company line from Steam is that the third parties set their prices, but it seems like some sort of contractual markdown at some point should be implemented.  Also, their discount pricing is great when it happens.  When they had Bioshock for $14.99, I told everyone I knew that had not played it yet, because of how well that game plays on a PC.  More of this needs to happen via third parties.  It would really boost sales if they did some launch day price cuts for 24 hours or something of that sort, just to get me to buy first day.  These are just some suggestions, but I am sure there are far more opportunities for Steam to make the games cheaper.

Steam is a great tool, and a great community and the Steam Cloud will just make it better, but until the Store prices start to get in line with the true market pricing, I will continue to pass on a lot of titles that are there.  I am tempted, and have more than once told myself I should be buying on Steam to support the efforts, but when I find things cheaper, just about everywhere else, it just becomes too difficult to convince myself to spend the extra cash on Steam.  I will still probably turn to them for niche titles that come out cheap, like Audiosurf, but not for much else.