It's stupid, sure, but it's also more or less unavoidable
People are sure throwing around a lot of words like "unavoidable" in this discussion.
Amazon marketplace is a bunch of people trying to move their old stock at the lowest price, which means that the price is always very fluid as stock gets bought and prices get shifted downwards to compete with the lowest price. Single-retailer fixed prices are often laggy; this is no different than the time I bought Neverwinter Nights as a bundle with both expansions because it was cheaper that just buying the expansions.
Of course it's different, because it's the difference between a physical product and a digital one. There's no damn reason Steam should charge the same price for a digital download than a price of a physical copy other than "because we can".
even if they could, the companies licensing the games wouldn't go for it.
See, NOW you're getting to the real reason here. What we're talking about is price-fixing by the publishers. Going back to the music industry, they got in some trouble for that a few years back.
After all, there's a finite number of copies that can be obtained at that Amazon list price.
All of which cost money to press, pack, and ship.
The World of Goo incident was damning proof that "no DRM, just trust" is not realistically viable. (The developer has since gone bankrupt.)
One example isn't proof of shit. Stardock, CDProjekt, blah blah blah.
The games industry can't expect to be fiscally solvent without some kind of system to prevent people from easily playing their games for free.
Yeah, because it's SO HARD for people to do that with most PC games now.
That means some kind of DRM, and the only DRM that really works so far is third-party authentication, either like Steam or like World of Warcraft. If the company falls apart overnight, yes, maybe your games are now unplayable; but at this point, that simply has to be an acknowledged risk of purchasing games for the PC.
Something doesn't "have" to be acknowledged just because you say it does. There are plenty of publishers turning profits on games that are available through means other than Steam.
The distinction here is that DRM doesn't do any good for music, because everything on the iTunes music store is also available on CD, which can't be effectively DRM'd. It'd be silly to worry about DRM for a product that's already readily available elsewhere without it.
Yes, because there are no games on Steam that I could just torrent.
You did hear about the 90% piracy rate thing, yes? I have a hard time believing that there's no causal connection.
Wow, I don't even know where to BEGIN critizing that response.
First of all, it's a strawman; instead of defending against Det's point that you have produced only one example, you're defending why that example is right.
Secondly, you produce no fucking evidence whatsoever to actually defend your example other than the word of a biased source whose research methods appear to be "torrents I've looked at" and "E-Mails I've gotten".
Music can be made by one person, they don't even need to have an instrument.
[...]
Video games on the other hand, and I am speaking of those games making use of modern graphics ie Xbox 360 quality, not independent games of a smaller scale
You're right, the music industry and the game industry ARE very different if you explicitly state that you're talking about cheaply-produced independent music but are absolutely not talking about cheaply-produced independent games.
That Steam also happens to make sure I'm not a criminal on the side
See, as a consumer I tend to take offense to being treated, by default, as a potential criminal. I'm funny that way.
