The highly anticipated multi-platform title Prototype opened up for pre-orders via Steam yesterday and publisher ActiVision has, in all its wisdom, set the price at €59.99 for mainland Europe. A whopping €60 for a digitally distributed PC game? Is that supposed to be some kind of joke? With current exchange rates €60 equals $84, and it’s roughly twice as much as a hard copy of the game, if you buy it at the right store.

We know that game publishers earn a lot more money per sale via digital distribution than they do in retail, this because they effectively remove manufacturing costs and the cut taken by middlemen like distribution centres and stores. At the same time publishers who offer sales via download can’t undercut retail prices, if they did then no stores would bother stocking the games. We know this, but no matter how you calculate the pricing and take various additional taxes into account there is no excuse for trying to sell a PC game for €60.

The current Steam price table looks like this:

In times when the PC platform is struggling with piracy you would expect publishers to at least try and keep their prices as fair as possible, not go out of their way to screw customers. I sincerely hope that no Europeans purchase this game via Steam. There are so many other options and we shouldn’t let the greedy buggers over at ActiVision rip us off.

I have just finished posting all of the reviews that I had left on my computer, a lot of them were on GS, but I accidentally deleted my review folder a couple of months ago, and only realised it after I emptied my recycle bin. There was well over a 100 reviews in there, some of the reviews that I posted belong to my brother aswell but I can't remember which ones so I just stuck them all up. Have fun reading them :P