Damn you Valve. Damn you all to hell.

[Konedima]

Buying Valve games: the sad realisation that whenever you buy it, it'll probably be on sale in Steam inside of a month.

[Poo Bear]

and the strange retail screw over that means it's cheaper to walk to the supermarket, buy it in a box, come home, enter a code and let Steam install it.

[Rup]

Portal 2's not on sale already is it?

I've only played the single-player so far and it's very good. It doesn't have quite the magic of the original. The new testing elements work well; my only complaints are that there were a few sections where I couldn't see where I was supposed to go, and that the final battle is too easy. There's two ending songs, neither as catchy as 'Still Alive' but they're still good.

I wasn't sure about Stephen Merchant, especially as he's just doing Stephen Merchant, but it grew on me and it works better towards the end. And now it's the other way around: when I hear him on the Barclays ad on TV I think of lines from Portal

[Poo Bear]

Not on sale, but bricks and mortar retail hates online with a vengeance and some of the other portals are even bigger than Steam so they can dictate terms. So it's £29.99 from Steam direct. Buy it from Amazon or Play and it's £26.99 - eh? Asda for £27.97 - huh?

That's the power of a portal (sorry ) to control price - think how much those places must shift such that Steam have gone along with being undercut. Although, Steam are secretly laughing, because even if you buy it from Asda you still have to install the Steam client so they can sell you the next one direct.

It's interesting that Steam's price is only being undercut a little, that indicates how much power Steam has to fight back. I suspect the shops and online portals _might_ be what it holding the price that high too. Maybe in a few years Portal4 will be $19.99 from Steam and $29.99 everywhere else It would make sense, buying direct you cannot trade in later, but from a shop you can, so in theory the direct price should come down and the shop price should be a bit higher.

[Konedima]

Sometimes other digital download sites undercut Steam - I have a good example. Metro 2033 was on sale a couple of weeks ago, but thanks to regional pricing in Steam, it was about twice as expensive here as anywhere else.

But with a little digging, I find that it was on sale on Gamersgate for half the asking price on Steam (in other countries, not our inflated price). So I bought it there.

The really fun part... Metro 2033 uses Steamworks. So what I got from Gamersgate was a Steam key, just enter it in Steam, and it's just like having bought it through Steam. Except greedy Valve (okay, so the publishers make them do it, but they don't have to make it so easy for them) gets nothing.

[Poo Bear]

Actually that's true, I've noticed Gamersgate and Impulse have twigged that its the sales that are key. They're still a bit slow on the uptake though, impulse have just started doing a regular weekend sale, they should have been doing that for years!

[Konedima]

So true. There's a lot - A LOT (just look at my games list) of games that I bought on special that I wouldn't have thought about at full price.