After watching the Quick Look for this game, I went to Steam to see how much they were charging for it in compaprison to the disc version.  Imagine my surprise  when I could find no trace of it.  After doing some digging via google, I found some unconfirmed info.  Apparently, THQ has some sort of exclusivity deal with Game (for the benefit of non-U.K. people: Game is a big videogame store chain in the UK, probably akin to something like Gamestop in the U.S.).  It seems that it will eventually become available on Steam at a later date, but I am not certain of this. I realise that this is probably not the first occurence of this, but this is the first time that I have personally heard of such a practice.  
 
Obviously this is a feeble ploy by Game to battle against Steam's dominance in PC retail.  In my opinion, all it achieves is frustration for people like me who simply want to add another title to their Steam collection. It makes me want to avoid buying anything from Game for performing such a dick move.
 
So has anything like this ever happened in U.S. or Australia or any other region? and what do you think of brick and mortar retailers doing things like this?

Sucks dude.

It's totally available on Amazon.

First time I have heard of anything like this in the U.K. 
 
I hope this does not happen often as I have moved onto digital purchases for PC and 95% are from steam,I have 68 titles in my games list now and with the great deals steam keep having I cannot help to just keep buying very good games at amazing prices, for example I bought Batman:AA a few months back for £3.75, It was a game I wanted to buy at launch but things happened and it fell of my radar but when I seen it the steam sale I was amazed, the game was less than 2 years old when I bought, Infact its still less than 2 years old so it was probably less than 18 months old when I bought it, and £36.25 difference is a hell of a price. 
 
I also got the THQ pack quite awhile ago for something like £25 and that came with 20+ games, Company Of heroes+ expansions, saints row 2, Stalker 1, Metro 2033, Dawn Of War 2, D.O.W2: Chaos Rising, Dawn of war gold edition plus 3 expansions, Red Faction Guerilla, Red Faction 1-2, titan quest,titan quest immortal throne,Frontlines fuels of war, full spectrum warrior, Juiced 2 and a couple of others, That was a great deal. 
 
Bioshock 2 for £3.50, Far Cry 1-2 for £5, GTA4+ LCE for £7.50, Crysis+ warhead for a about a £5, theres great deals on all the time. 

The same reason Skyrim is only just now available to pre-purchase. Game are being dicks about it. Especially as it is a fucking Steamworks game, I think.

@djames216 just for the record, Space Marine is a steam works game and as such any copy of the game you purchase will come with a steam code. So it will definitely be part of your steam collection. Hell, I imagine you could even add the code and download the game Sacking off the disc entirely! Still sucks all the same, I want to give valve my money for them being nice to me as a customer, not Game who only stock 10 new games 5 of which are variants of the sims and warcraft :/

@djames216 just for the record, Space Marine is a steam works game and as such any copy of the game you purchase will come with a steam code. So it will definitely be part of your steam collection. Hell, I imagine you could even add the code and download the game Sacking off the disc entirely! Still sucks all the same, I want to give valve my money for them being nice to me as a customer, not Game who only stock 10 new games 5 of which are variants of the sims and warcraft :/

I ordered it from Game (felt hell of guilty as I didn't find about about the reason it wasn't on Steam until like a week later) and got an email a couple of days ago that reads something....ok...barely anything....like this...

The edition with the armour DLC codes is no longer available, so we haven't shipped it. But heres some codes for the DLC anyway and we're sending you the regular game, it'll be late. So we also refunded £5 to your card.

I find it crazy strange that they get the exclusive rights to the game and then can't even handle stock correctly, earliest I'll get it now is monday which sucks, despite my love for mondays... just glad I have Dead Island to hold me over.

Does the UK ban steam games now? :o
I bought it the day before it came out, no problem.

@amir90: It has nothing to do with banning games and everything to do with retailer exclusivity deals.

It's £22 on Shopto.net for a Steam download code. Basically the same as buying on Steam, but cheaper. That's how I got mine and they seem to be doing it with a lot of other PC games as well.

@ElectricBoogaloo said:

It's £22 on Shopto.net for a Steam download code. Basically the same as buying on Steam, but cheaper. That's how I got mine and they seem to be doing it with a lot of other PC games as well.

Me too.

It's not too much of a problem if you shop around. I generally did when I found out it wasn't on steam and I'm fine with it.

It does suck that some games just don't appear on Steam (Homefront and Brink were some of these that disappeared.) but it really doesn't matter because usually you can get these somewhere else (sometimes cheaper) and if they're Steamworks, it's as if you bought it through Steam anyway.