I do not understand the pricing, can someone explain

[Provost Martin]

It's probably a deal with the retailers. Steam is not widely known yet, so most people find out about games browsing through the shelves. If Steam undercuts BestBuy, Walmart, GameStop, etc, then they will stop offering the games and Steam only games will definitely get fewer costumers.

THIS. I remember reading about it. Unfortunately I can no longer find the article.

Was it entirely up to Valve however, games would be cheaper.

http://www.next-gen.biz/features/valve-are-games-too-expensive

 

[Commander Bello]

Steam is great for such impulse buying. I mean people are generally not stupid

 

[CurseUppl]

Personally, I think endlessly filling this forum with threads on Steam and pricing won't put a dent in million dollar contracts and corporations, who clearly exist because they are able to satisfy the majority of their customers.

For now.

 

[Souron]

The marginal cost of box, transport, etc is absolutely not 1€
After development costs, selling digital versions has 0 cost for them. While selling boxes has a lot of cost, not only the materials of the box and the transports, etc, but also many intermediators like the shop, the distributor....

OK maybe 4 euro...

The cost of buying a WoW sleeve is $3 (2 euros). And the retailer does expect to make a profit on those, otherwise he would not sell them. A box is only slightly more expensive. Additionally games like civ are expected to have high sales, so they can be procured in bulk.

So I'd place 4 euro as the upper limit on the marginal cost of a game. And marginal costs at <$1 figure would not surprise me.

 

[Commander Bello]

Personally, I think endlessly filling this forum with threads on Steam and pricing won't put a dent in million dollar contracts and corporations, who clearly exist because they are able to satisfy the majority of their customers.

This is only true if unsatisfied customers have to assume that they are alone with their dissatisfaction.
Obviously, this is not true, and therefore these threads are very useful, as bringing it to attention that the dissatisfaction is shared by many others, too.

This gives the customers a chance to make things change, because in the end all those "million dollar deals" are based on our money.