According to a survey distributed to 1,000 videogame industry professionals, the iPhone has shaped videogames more than any other device or console, and Steve Jobs has shaped videogames more than any other human. The questionnaire was sent out to industry attendees of the London Games Conference, and asked participants to make a top five list of various professionals and hardware. Based on the answers received, the LGS ranked them according to the number of mentions.

The iPhone took top honors in the "products" category, earning an impressive 53% of voters claiming it belongs in the top five of all time, and 17% as number one. The full results were as follows:

• iPhone: 17%
• Wii: 7%
• Xbox Live: 3%
• PlayStation One: 3%
• Steam: 2%

As for people, Apple also took the throne, with Steve Jobs being mentioned in the top five list of 46% of survey takers, and as number one by 26%. Here’s how he stacked up against other industry giants:

• Steve Jobs 26%
• Gabe Newell 16%
• Shigeru Miyamoto 7%
• Tim Berners-Lee 4%
• Mark Zuckerberg 3%

Fuck everything about this.

Source: The Escapist

Thank you everyone, who joined Kalypso forum and said something about this unfair price.

We won something, but not much. The price has been lowered 5€, down to 44,99€. BUT this doesn’t fix the problem. We get now ripped off by 52% instead of 67%.

Beware. There are more Kalypso games with ultra unfair price as written in my post also. I think that they will simply delete the it and ban me from the forums.

WARNING!! DO NOT BUY THIS GAME (DUNGEONS) because of awfully unfair price for EU! Unless it’s on sale with a very cheap price!

Yay, finally, Dungeon Keeper franchise sequel Dungeons is available as the Steam news claims.

Pre-Purchase DUNGEONS – Steam Special Edition and receive M.U.D. TV to play now!
Assume the role of a mighty Dungeon Lord and create your own diabolical dungeon. Lure Heroes into your labyrinthine with the promise of treasure and a good fight – only to trap them with your ingenious devices.
DUNGEONS – STEAM SPECIAL EDITION includes an exclusive extra mission, all new maps to play in sandbox mode and a variety of unique prestige gimmicks to customize your dungeon!
Pre-Purchase offer ends February 10th, 10am PST.

But hey, wait a minute. Wtf is wrong with the price, 49.99€ ($66.55)?? and in US only $39.99 (30.00€)? That’s 67% more expensive!

And not only in Steam!

Impulse:

Dungeons is available for pre-order worldwide for $39.99 USD | 44.99 EUR | 34.95 GBP. Dungeon pre-orders will be charged immediately with instant access to Ceville. There are NO REFUNDS on this title. Dungeons will be released worldwide on Impulse February 10, 2011.

GamersGate:

Price: 44.95€ – http://www.gamersgate.com/DD-DUNGEONS/dungeons

I wanted this game! Now I don’t! Unless they correct the price politics. But they won’t.

Fortunately there is a thread in Kalypso forums about this Steam Special Edition and one guy asked the question, why is the price in EU 20€ more expensive than in US. Let’s find out what they answer to this. And we got an answer:

They don’t give shit about EU! Ok that is not entirely true, because they finally lowered the price by 5€, but unfortunately it is still far from being fair price :(

Okay, I registered and posted something too, let’s wait answer for this.

So DO NOT BUY THIS GAME (DUNGEONS)! Unless it’s on sale with a very cheap price!

APB Steam refund update

25/09/2010 in Digital Distribution, News

If you bought APB from Steam, apparently EA are now offering a free game as a refund. Valve put up a brick wall, but EA are making up for the fact that customer who bought their game ended up with nothing to show for it.

If you contact them through this site, and tell them you’d like another game to replace APB, they will give you any game currently available on the EA Store. I don’t think that they will let you get preorders, but it’s worth a shot.

You can pick from the likes of Mass Effect 2, Dragon Age: Origins, Spore, The Saboteur, Burnout Paradise: The Ultimate Box, Battlefield: Bad Company 2 and all sorts of other stuff.

Thanks to CHooligans for the heads up.

SavyGamer » APB Steam refund update

This new idea is more like DLCs for PC and console games that let you "download" extra weapons and features, when those features were on the disc all along (like with Bioshock 2 and Mafia 2).

Google Dutch to English translation of hardware.info  Intel G6951 upgradeable CPU review
http://preview.tinyurl.com/372l5p

Source: engadget.com

The original thread concerning the price differences in Europe (and the rest of the world) on Steam has reached over 1 000 000 views lately! This isn’t a particularly good thing but at least it’s not closed and people still seem to rage about it (after almost 2 years!).

Now go there and leave a reply and make sure Valve notices us once more!

Looks like $1 = €1 after all (and it appears it’s gonna stay like this forever…)

(click on the picture to see the deal)

You probably all remember nice hit-game Bioshock that collected many awards and so on. Now it is time for sequel. But like usually, there are no good things without bad things. The good thing is that you can get Bioshock 1 for free, you can give the extra copy to your friend, if you already have one. And there is now multiplayer! Achievements! DLC‘s! And somekinda social networking based on Games for Windows live.

And the bad thing is the price for Europeans, except United Kingdom citizens.

US: $49.99 $44.99 (~32€)
UK: £39.99 £26.99 (2% lower) <- 33% discount not 10% like the others!!!!!
EU: 49,99€ 44,99€ (43% higher)

Fortunately there is chance to buy 4-pack, which makes one game (~34€) be priced equal to US single price 32€.

US: $149.97 $134.97 (~95€)
UK: £89.97 £80.97 (2% lower)
EU: 149,97€ 134,97€ (43% higher)

Minimum requirements

• OS: Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7
• Processor: AMD Athlon 64 Processor 3800+ 2.4Ghz or better, Intel Pentium 4 530 3.0Ghz Processor or better
• Memory: 2GB
• Graphics: NVIDIA 7800GT 256MB graphics card or better, ATI Radeon X1900 256MB graphics card or better
• DirectX®: DirectX 9.0c
• Hard Drive: 11GB
• Sound: 100% DirectX 9.0C compliant sound card or onboard sound

NB! Don’t forget to check out their awesome homepage!

Crossed words in this article are supposed to be treated as false, please ignore them!

Read more about this here in an updated article!

Watch out for this option when you’re purchasing games on Steam:

If you have selected this option Steam will remember your security code you provided earlier – I did not agree to remember this code – and right after you “Buy” a game by clicking the proper button you won’t be prompted if you want to use PayPal, VISA (or any other payment method) and you will buy any game instantly. Best way to check this is to buy any random DLC for a game you don’t own and you will see that it will try to purchase the game automatically.

We encourage you to send a support ticket to Valve to make this optional to remember the security code. You can use this pre-made e-mail message:

Hello!

I am concerned that Steam Store saved my credit card’s security code on an external server after I selected “Save my payment information so checkout is easy next time”. In the past this option only saved my name, address, phone number and still asked me about credit card number, security code and it’s validity.

Also by selecting this option Steam Store prevented me from chosing other payment methods than VISA.

Please make this optional and do not save my credentials next time (but save my name, address etc – just like it was before).

Thank you for your help,

XXX

Update #1:

Sure you can remove your details from My Account section in the store but that is not the point. Steam shouldn’t remember expiration date, security code and the card number itself.

Update #2:

Thanks to our friend ld13 we managed to find interesting information from VISA’s website:

Avoid CVV2 Storage. All merchants are prohibited from storing CVV2 data. When asking a cardholder for CVV2, merchants must not document this information on any kind of paper order form or store it on any database.

Source: http://usa.visa.com/download/merchants/rules_for_visa_merchants.pdf (Page 12)

CVV2 storage. The Visa U.S.A. Inc. Operating Regulations prohibit merchants and/or their agents from storing the Card Verification Value 2 data (security code printed within or immediately to the right of the signature panel) after transaction authorization.

Source: http://usa.visa.com/download/merchants/rules_for_visa_merchants.pdf (Page 60)

Card Verification Value 2 (CVV2)
A Visa fraud prevention system used in card-not-present transactions to ensure that the card is valid. The CVV2 is the three-digit value that is printed on the back of all Visa cards. Card-not-present merchants ask the customer for the CVV2 and submit it as part of their authorization request. For information security purposes, merchants are prohibited from storing CVV2 data.

Source: http://usa.visa.com/download/merchants/rules_for_visa_merchants.pdf (Page 130)

Previously only differing the price between US Dollar, Euro and British Pound, they now topped it by even discriminating between the European countries.

So we not only have the well known unfair price difference between Dollar, Euro and Pound:

US L4D2 Pre-Purchase: $44.99

EU L4D2 Pre-Purchase: 44,99€

UK L4D2 Pre-Purchase: £26.99

but also differences between european contries:

Germany, France, Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, Sweden and a lot of others pay the high, unfair price of 44,99€ (L4D2)
http://store.steampowered.com/app/550/?cc=de (or /?cc= fr, nl, dk, fi, se..)

while countries like: Poland, Norway, Italy, Spain, Lithuania and a few other – for incomprehensible reasons -, pay a much cheaper price of 34,19€, which is only slightly more than the UK price in Euro!
http://store.steampowered.com/app/550/?cc=pl

Thats a price difference of 10€ or even 20€ less when buying a bundle of four L4D2 copies.

Workarounds:

1.) Gifting cheap games to friends in an expensive, foreign region is thankfully still possible, eventhough it probably won’t be for long, judging from recent developements.

So have a good foreign friend who lives in a cheap priced region gift you L4D2, after sending him the money via PayPal or likewise.

2.) If you can live without the “exclusive baseball bat” weapon that comes with Steam Pre-Purchases: Don’t support the Steam Regime at all and Pre-Order L4D2 on Amazon.co.uk for the cheapest of all prices: £26.99 (29,26€)
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Electronic-Arts-Left-Dead-DVD/dp/B002BSH9J4/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=videogames&qid=1254503223&sr=8-2

German users should be aware that L4D2, like 1, will be censored again, when buying from their region.

Buy the game at Amazon.co.uk or have a foreign friend gift it to you, for uncensored Zombie Slaughter.

Join the forum discussion on this post

US: $29.99
UK: £29.99 (67% higher)
EU: 39,99€ (94% higher)

Join the forum discussion on this post

So what actually happened? Those lunatics are removing every single post that contains a link to other store(s) than Valve’s. They claim people are advertising? I understand those guys work for Valve in a way (they must obey the forum rules and enforce them) but seriously some of them should take a chill pill or simply calm the fuck down.

I mean look at last few pages of the original Looks like $1 = €1 after all thread. These guys are out of their minds and seriously out of the line here – deleting every single post with links to other stores because they claim that people are advertising!

But actually people are simply pasting links to different Steam alternatives like Good Old Games (the whole Fallout prices thing), Impulse, Direct2Drive and others and compare prices to Steam prices. That’s it.

Is comparing considered advertising? Maybe in their little brains but in the modern world it’s like this, when people see that they can get the same product for 50% or even cheaper, guess which place they will choose? Yes, Steam moderators, it’s hard to believe but they will chose the cheaper alternative which might be harsh for Valve’s business (I’ll give you that) but this is not to piss off Valve it’s to make them lower the prices. In real world when you see that some store sells the same stuff for a lot more cash your natural behavior would be coming up to that asshole and tell him that you and your friends will never shop here again because they rip-off people and guess what? A store owner with brain will actually think about that and do something about it. But not Valve, “the creators of best-selling game franchises and leading technologies”.

Right here, right now I ask everyone who’s interested to visit official Steam forums in their free time and defend our friends (or should I say friends of our cause?) who have some really good points there but are getting bashed by the childish moderators – of course most of Steam forums moderators are nice people and you should always remember that and you should also remember not to spam, rage or post offending stuff there because you will simply get banned.

Consider this message as simple rant and RAGE!!11 and ignore it if you don’t like it. Good night.