Why does Steam charge us $90 USD for the deluxe edition and $80 USD for the standard?
Why does EBGames.com.au charge $128 AUD for the special edition (about $112 USD)?
That may fly for brick and mortar where multiple handlers will add their small markups (though even GameHead, a game's importer and wholesaler has the price at $82.75 AUD == $72.56 USD), but how do you explain Steam's price difference?
1. To make more money, some people will buy the "DELUXE EDITION" just because it has a fancy title, I am one of these people.
2. To make more money, quite simple really, im sure they could charge a standard price of $50 world wide, but they can use regional pricing to increase profits, so they will.
3. To make more money, just because via selling digitally they make less overheads does not mean they will pass all of or any of the saving onto the customer. The shareholders prefer bigger dividens than cheaper prices of Civ5.
It's really a matter of price elasticity of demand.
If your not an economist then I will explain briefly, this is a term to refer how "elastic" (how much it changes) is demand of a product with changes in price. It really depends on the good. Water, good old fashioned H2O, if your water company and every alternate water selling company raised thier prices 10 fold, your "demand" of water would not change unless you were using more than you needed (I.e water fights with hose pipes) as Water is a neccesity to live, you will pay extra for it if you are forced to, you have no choice. The question is, is Civ5 similar, will people still buy it if a extortionate price is charged, the answer is hard to quantify, but I would say a lot of people would still buy it if they could afford to, other people may be just too offended at the price (these consumers are Price Inelastic) and not buy it. If a product is very price inelastic a producer/distributor would be less likely to raise prices because the resulting drop in demand will cut profits which is what they want to avoid, where as if it is price elastic, which is most likely the case, an increase in price won't cause enough drop in demand to make profits fall, they infact increase.
So if you want to blame someone for 2k's pricing policies, blame thier accountant/economist who is telling them that thier product is price elastic. Or rather actually blame yourselfs for treating a product which is not a necessity like it is. A game should be price inelastic, but in reality, people like thier games and will pay for them.