Has the time come to really push Impulse as a major competitor to Steam? Impulse has now become established as a stable platform. However, the range of games is highly limited. Coupled with this is the recent decision by Steam to introduce regional pricing.

To explain the significances of this horrendous error of judgment prices of games on steam have recently rocketed for European customers. They recently introduced charging of European customers in Euros, and British customers in Pounds. Yet the effect is to hike the price actually paid. Sure we avoid a small bank charge for changing local currency to dollars, but the exchange rate now offered on steam is a highly unfavorable $1=€1.

This means for customers in large parts of Europe have seen game prices increase by up to double. Bizarrely, and I can’t fathom how anyone at steam thought this was a good idea, it now costs far more in Europe to buy a digital download on Steam than it does to buy a boxed copy from your local gamestore. Yet the whole point of digital download is supposed to be a quid-pro-quo; You will sell me a game directly, cutting out a small army of middlemen, from box makers, manual printers, physical distributors, retailers; And in return for not having a boxed copy or a point of return, or even the ability to resell my game or loan my copy to friends and family, you will charge me a much lower price than I would otherwise pay. This of course also has significant DRM advantages to the seller, they can restrict secondary use. Furthermore many gamers who might be tempted to pirate due to high retail prices will stay legal due to the low cost of digital download and its convenience.

Yet now with Steams catastrophic error of judgment they have alienated almost their entire European customer base. The complaint thread on their forum now has over 3,000 replies. While British customers have been relatively unscathed it’s still had its effect.  For example last night I bough World of Goo on Impulse (absolutely excellent game btw) I bought it in dollars and it cost me £13.48. The exact same game on Steam is £16.99. Its not as bad as the doubling that European customers have experienced. But I’m still going to buy in dollars everytime.

One possible (edit: very strong) explanation is that Steam recently got into bed with EA, being able to offer some of their games through the service. EA have a venerable history of doing whatever they can to rub salt in the eyes of customers while insulting them. Perhaps it was EA that forced this price hike. Whatever the reason there is a significant amount of homeless European gamers that could well move on mass to Impulse if the game list could be expanded.

Just please keep it in dollars!

Just please, slam the phone down on EA unless they want to let you distribute their games without dictating terms. Since that is never going to happen, we are better off without their malign influence.