Retailers Versus Steam?

A story on MCV with a quote in the headline (which isn't in the article itself) stating "Valve monopoly is killing PC market," reports they understand "that at least two big-name digital retailers are facing financial difficulties as they struggle to compete" with Steam. "I've fought hard for my customer, and never before have I had to give my customers away. Steam is killing the PC market and it is no wonder digital retailers are failing," says the director of a Steam rival. "Steam is locking down the market." In a separate report they also discuss retailer dissatisfaction with Steam's dominance of the marketplace, which insiders tell them amounts to 80% of PC downloadable games. Since this competes with online sales initiatives by retailers, they say at least two major U.K. merchants will demand that publishers remove Steam integration from their games or they will refuse to sell them. With PC game sales at retail stores in steady decline, it seems an odd moment for these stores to flex their atrophying muscle, but they quote the head of sales at a big-name digital service provider saying: "At the moment the big digital distributors need to stock games with Steam. But the power resides with bricks and mortar retailers, they can refuse to stock these titles. Publishers are hesitant, but retail must put pressure on them."
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77.
 
Re: Retailers Versus Steam?
Nov 11, 2010, 16:12
Dev
77.
Re: Retailers Versus Steam? Nov 11, 2010, 16:12
Nov 11, 2010, 16:12
Dev
 
Creston wrote on Nov 11, 2010, 15:52:
StingingVelvet wrote on Nov 11, 2010, 14:16:
What's up with so many people saying they use Steam because you can't find boxed versions? If you're on the internet for Steam perhaps you heard of something called amazon?

Have you ever heard that there are gamers in other countries than the US? And that Amazon doesn't ship to said countries? There's several people making that exact argument in this thread.

Creston
I just finished the whole thread (at least skimming) and I didn't see that. Maybe I missed it. I saw a lot of people saying they couldn't find something at GAMESTOP though because of their pitiful or non existent PC selection, and that being a reason they shop at steam.

Most of those countries have an amazon they can shop at, even if its not amazon.com
Amazon.co.uk, amazon.de, etc.
They may not have as good of prices for the goods or charge more for shipping, but they generally exist.
I've actually purchased from other amazon sites and shipped to USA before on the rare occasion (such as when amazon.de has a german board game thats cheaper to buy from them and pay international shipping than other alternatives).

In fact, look at the bottom of this page where you can click regions:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=596184

The ONLY country I saw (I checked each regions list which is at the bottom of the region page), that they specifically say they won't ship to is Russia (and on double checking, they actually still ship to them, just they require priority shipping for some reason when you ship there). And they listed 100-200 countries all told.

Edit:
In fact, I'll just copy paste all the regions countries. I'm not going to bother cleaning it up for posting, too much work.

Edit moar:
Due to excessive length, someone requested I remove the list so I did
I did a line # count on the list and it was 226. Isn't that every country in the world? Of course maybe there are dupes on the list, but I'm not going to take the time to figure out how many there are.

Note that if there are region restrictions on specific titles/items, that's not generally amazon's fault. Its generally either the publisher's fault (like when you can't get some stuff on d2d or steam in certain countries), or its the fault of the individual country for banning that title.

This comment was edited on Nov 11, 2010, 16:39.
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