Ubisoft and EA punish their users, and I personally won’t buy their games, because the anti-piracy measures are too much of a hassle, and because I won’t support a company that takes such measures against their own customers.

Portal and Portal 2 are both great games. I grabbed Portal the last time they were iivgng it away for free, back when Steam had arrived on OS X, and got Portal 2 when it was on sale for $30. Awesome games, just too short to pay full price for.Mandeep @ ShergillGames recently posted..

However, even if such a ubiquity came to pass, games are still seen as a fnacnaiil investment, due to the unconscionable $59.99 standard price point. The most common argument given by publishers at the beginning of the 360/PS3 generation for the price increase was that next-generation games were more difficult and, critically, more expensive to develop. While it is true that game development budgets increased significantly from the PS2/Xbox generation to the 360/PS3 generation, they are still, with the exception of a very few outliers, far below the average budget of a feature film. The key difference, as I have argued previously, is the difference in audience size. $10 DVDs sell to tens of millions of consumers and make a handy profit on $100 million dollar films. If a game sold to tens of millions of consumers, it wouldn’t need to be priced at $60 to make a profit on its measly (by comparison) $20 million development budget. And if you’re wondering where we find those extra customers, all you have to do is lower your price point.

I’ve used steam support a couple of times when I’ve needed to and they’ve been great.

Also when I got a new PC I just backed up all my games on to my external hard drive and just copied and pasted them onto my new PC and they worked like magic.

Half of Russia, west of the Ural mountain range, is in (eastern) Europe. The other half, east of the Urals, is in Asia.

It’s a big freaking country.

Pricing is a problem, not everywhere but in some countries it is.

Yea, but when? 🙁