Getting Steamed: digital distribution for games isn't there yet

Steam is becoming the online gaming distribution system du jour, with big publishers flocking to sign their titles on to the download service. Such is the penetration that owner Valve software has indicated interest in distributing media content outside of games.

It's all rosy then — if you live in the USA.

Steam users outside of North America have been on the receiving end of some pretty questionable treatment from the big publishers for a while now. Either games suffer a greatly marked up price outside ol' Uncle Sam, or are simply not available.

Valve has consistently responded that they offer the service worldwide, and it's up to game publishers to determine availability and pricing — so we decided to track down the local publishers, and where possible elevate it higher to get an answer. The range of responses was interesting, to say the least.

Big kudos to Ubisoft for opening the curtain a little bit on what has so far been a black box of "we're not telling" from the rest of the publishers.

There are many more games available at the US Steam store.

Limited Release

Given that the answers aren't greatly forthcoming, we're left to speculate on the reasons why games aren't available locally, or are (as in the case of Call of Duty 4), ridiculously overpriced.

The first potential issue is distribution rights. While online distribution cuts out disc replication, packaging, design time, logistics and dealing with retail fronts, different companies handle a publisher's distribution in different regions. Cutting out this middle man potentially takes the legs out of an entire business model, and leaves a lot of pissed off people.

The shopfronts are also bypassed, and so it's quite the delicate situation — especially since these still make a fair whack of money. Nonetheless, removing these barriers to the customer should lower price — and with EB and JB Hi-Fi pushing used titles hard and potentially cutting into publisher's profits, it's interesting they haven't been pushing to snip the cord sooner.

Next we have to consider what Valve charges for the service — frankly, we don't know. Presumably deals would change depending on the size of the corporation they're dealing with, the amount of titles distributed, the amount of expected traffic consumed and maybe even the Metacritic rating. Let's face it, the more triple A titles that are on the service, the more attractive it will be to customers, potentially making it worth Valve's while to give highly rated games a bit of a discount.

Another issue is licenses — take for instance, music. It's pretty common these days for games to have audio licensed from a major music label, rather than being done in-house. These deals are region specific, based on how much expected exposure the audio will get, how it's used, and even how popular the song is. When you open the scope up to the world, costs greatly increase, and could be a valid reason for titles to cost more in one region than another. The international licenses for Rock Band must have been migraine inducing.

Finally we have to deal with local classification systems. Admittedly Rockstar might have a get out of jail free card here — a number of its games have been banned locally and have subsequently been altered for store release — whereas the online versions are likely to still contain the contentious material.

Despite Steam's age and presence in the market, all these things point towards an industry that is only taking its fledgling steps into dealing with a true global economy, simultaneous worldwide releases and unilateral licence agreements — and on top of this they have to drag others along with them to get there. Thankfully, games seem to be moving faster than movies.

PlayAsia will even tell you if your game is region locked. So far PlayStation 3 games are region free, while Xbox 360 is split into PAL and NTSC regions.

Overcharging

Even if we're a bit forgiving on release times, the days of international price gouging — both online and in local stores — are beginning their inevitable stumble into demise. The slow disintegration of region locked games, and the rise of online stores such as PlayAsia means that importing identical, vastly cheaper titles from overseas is an option, rather than going down to the store for your local bloated price game-fix. Why buy for $109.95, when you can buy for $59.95, with $5 to $20 shipping? From what we've observed, a sizeable import culture has sprung up as a result of Australia's over-expensive store offerings compared to the US.

Reactions from businesses have been decidedly backward on this — from Sony's amazingly poor showing of shutting down Lik-Sang for exporting PSPs to regions that didn't have them, to surprisingly, Valve's reaction to people who bought the Orange Box from Thailand cheaper and loaded it up in the US, only to find they had been locked out until they bought US regionalised copies. The concept of region-exclusive downloadable content has also begun to rear its ugly head, essentially becoming the new form of region locking.

And yet, regardless of population density, regional sales, taxes, classification systems — the internet has let the genie out of the box. If people can get games or hardware for vastly cheaper overseas, they will. If they can't get it in their region and can't import it, they're going to pirate it. The model is broken. Rather than implementing crazy anti-piracy schemes that do nothing but drive up the cost of games and more people to piracy, publishers should be focusing on how they can improve their business model on a global scale — or risk becoming the shambolic, obsolete mess the music industry is today.

There's really only one, simple answer to all of this — a global price on all games, content for all. Sadly the process required to reach this solution is no doubt horrible and convoluted.

The Rest of World (RoW) group on Steam is attempting to change the tide on regionalised games.

Solutions

What can we do for now? Make a lot of noise, until the powers that be pull themselves into line. A group on the Steam website, Rest of World (RoW), has been created to point out the flamingly obvious that if publishers were to release their product to the rest of the world, they'd make more money (shock!). As of writing, it has 3,910 members, and is bound to be more fruitful than anything that turns up on the infeasibly useless and thoroughly ignorable petitiononline.com.

If you have a steam account, nip on over and join the group. The more people in there, the more publishers are likely start paying attention.

Below is a list of the titles that are region specific, or overcharged for on Steam. C'mon people, we're in a global society! Catch up already!

Overpriced games in Australia

Games not available in Australia

Games available in Australia, but not available in the US