1 Year Anniversary

I can not believe it was a year ago! It all started with an innocent Steam Store Beta, which introduced the dreadful "conversion" 1€ = 1$. Few days later (despite the many comments on the official forums) they decided to introduce a new currency on Steam. The next day, I’ve created the “Looks like $1 = €1 after all” thread and later decided to create a website with rants about that conversion.

With the new currency introduced some strange coincidence happened, EA Games suddenly put their games in the Steam store.

For me, and many others on the Steam Forums, discussion with any of the "moderators" or Valve employess ended with ban. Then we decided to let publishers and game designers know that their games are overpriced on Steam. We e-mailed every single publisher/developer on Steam and received like 2 responses (from The Witcher makers, Savage 2 makers and some other indie devs). I think the rest of them didn’t even read our message.

Then we decided to go around it and let know game magazines and gaming websites about it. No luck here too. I guess most of them were American and they don’t care. Few European gaming websites (in Germany, Norway, Poland, Czech Republic and so on) wrote about it and from what we’ve seen on the comment pages no one was happy about it.

And finally we e-mailed Gabe Newell, Valve employess (one by one!), Steam support and none of them replied.

Oh and in the middle of all this we informed European Comission about the price differences between USA – Europe and United Kingdom – the rest of European countries (European Union countries come to mind).

After few weeks they responded with a pretty good letter which explained us that Valve can do whatever they want when it comes to USA – Europe price differences. As for United Kingdom most of us still don’t agree with Valve policy. Why can’t European Union citizens buy games in United Kingdom? Because apparently for Valve United Kingdom is not a part of European Union.

Anyway enough about this – we can’t do anything about it, we’re nobody comparing to Valve. It’s not like they’re going to change it now since they’ve already introduced (faulty) tiers system.

So we moved on… what do we do now? Do I know? Not really. But I think exposing flaws of Steam and it’s opponents (Impulse, Direct2Drive, Impulse, Good Old Games, G2Play) is our main goal right now. As well as providing the best deals on the Internet (including discount codes especially for our readers, free cdkeys some magazines give away from time to time and so on). By the way you can access this page by it’s brand new additional domain: http://www.digitaldistributions.eu!

We do some mini-reviews of games on Steam and other platforms too but this is more like fun than being serious ;-)

OK now the final thing, I think you guys will like this!

Check this website on December 19th (Saturday)!

Secret Event coming up!

Meanwhile “Looks like $1 = €1 after all” thread on Steam forums is over 806,000 responses – I think all of you should go there and post a short message (don’t spam) to just let Valve know that this is not going to fade away – maybe this year someone will actually respond?