It's the retailer, not the developer, that determines the prices. Complain to valve, or whomever else you are buying from. Firaxis really can't do anything about prices. I know this doesn't make having a price of 90 USD any better, but complaining to Firaxis isn't going to change anything. If a burger at McDonald's costs too much, you should complain to McDonald's, not the farmer who raised the cow.
I can't speak to the exact situation, but i used to work for a major games company in production so maybe I can offer some reasons why. We had several countries where we ended up licensing the distribution in that country. Why do this? Because the country might have excessive import duties to foreign companies. A domestic company which licenses it is effectively the producer who is manufacturing it outside that nation, so it's not a "foreign" import so it doesn't get the higher taxes. For some, we even went so far as to manufacture a small production in that country too... so it wouldn't even get the foreign manufacture tag (which sometimes gets taxes too) and would have lower shipping costs (but higher cost to produce per item because small production run). At the end of the day, it's pretty complex to juggle all these factors and to see what's the best situation. And yes, the cost to the consumer does come into play because higher cost = less unit sales.
Bottom line: we (the designer/producer) did what we needed to in order to make it profitable to market in that country. If it wasn't profitable even with these "tricks" (as it wasn't in several countries), then we simply didn't sell there at all.
At the end of the day, the consumers in that country had to pay a higher price, no matter what. Import / higher duties = higher price. License / lower taxes but the licensee got to mark it up (so they made their profit, too) = higher price. Either way, the consumers paid.
Blame anyone, I'd blame the country for the high taxes. That's what free trade agreements are all about.
But anyway, like I said, I can't say that is the case here, but perhaps it is.
Even if 2K wasn't doing any of this, it could simply be import duties and/or shipping and the like.
BTW, I don't know that the retailer has anything to do with it. As a general rule of thumb, retailers put the same markup regardless of the manufacturer. They may mark up differently on different
types of items (e.g., small ticket vs big ticket items), but a game is a game and will be marked up the same. Based on the original comment, it doesn't seem like other games are getting marked up, so there's something different about Civ. I'd be curious if other 2K titles are being marked up that much too.
