The've been doing it for ages.

A geforce 4 mx was based on the geforce 2 chip set. So it was not only weaker then the other geforce 4 cards, it was also weaker then the previous, third generation. The reason that they keep doing this is quite simple, they sold even if every magazine listed is as a must avoid:

"Despite harsh criticism by gaming enthusiasts, the GeForce4 MX was a market success. Priced about 30% above the GeForce 2 MX, it provided better performance, the ability to play a number of popular games that the GeForce 2 could not run well—above all else—to the average non-specialist it sounded as if it were a "real" GeForce4—i.e., a GeForce4 Ti. Although it was frequently out-performed by the older and more expensive GeForce 3, many buyers were unaware, particularly as Nvidia was quick not to let the GeForce 3 remain on the market. GeForce 4 MX was particularly successful in the PC OEM market, and rapidly replaced the GeForce 2 MX as the best-selling GPU.".

I wish we Europeans could buy it for that price. Closer to €100 here...

I thought the accusers have to come up with the evidence in a court case?

I just checked their Titan quest package. 10 euros + 20 euros for expansion. Even at half price that will be 15 euros. The D2D deal was for 5 pounds (~5.6 euros).

There's competition. D2Drive, gamersgate, impulse,...

Indeed. I remember the days when sites like yahoo and geocities offered online file storage, limited to 20mb a file.

Programs popped up which automatically made accounts on those services and uploaded your files. And http sites offering all new titles as geocities uploads. Those sites fought back with captchas.

Then came napster file sharing. Then came bittorent file sharing...

And now it's back to http warez.

We can buy the kindle at a serious premium and English books at another premium. There are however no titles in my native language, Dutch.
Without that, it'll be hard to sell here in Belgium.

I've bought games from gamersgate, direct2drive, impulse.net, gog.com and steam. Steam doesn't quite have a monopoly yet.

But the only service from this list I like more then steam is gog.com. Steam offers a great service which offers very fast downloads, an easy to use steam app, weekend deals, plenty of community features, achievements... The only thing they seriously fuck up is their price ranges. Direct dollar to euro conversions make me feel ripped of. It also means that new games are always cheaper to get at a retail store. Steam is only useful for weekend deals.

If you offer a service with non intrusive drm, a good community and cheaper prices I'll be glad to buy at your shop. Direct2drive is an example of how not do it. It offers very little community interaction. Their games are country restricted. A £5 game seems cheap at first until you see that others pay $5, it's 40% cheaper and again makes me feel ripped of. And needing both serial codes and activation codes makes things a mess to install. I received 4(!) serials when installing titan quest. Compare that to gog.com where a game plus expansion is offered in one bundle with no DRM. Those games are guaranteed to work with xp & vista. They offer user reviews, fora for each games, advised mods to use... And a game costs $6 even if I live in Europe.

There's room for competition but you need to offer a better service. Not just throw your DRM protected crap at your customers. And while steam is a nice platform there's definately room for improvement.

I agree. Nothing more terrifying then waking up and seeing an army of hedgehogs in your garden.

Steam, direct2drive, gog.com... The online game distributors are rising from the ground at a quick rate. And the games are getting larger and larger. How long until blu-ray replaces dvd for games on pc? Offering a 20 gb game to someone who has a 20 gb monthly limit is not going to get you any sales. And future game streaming services like OnLive are impossible with capped internet. Netflix, hulu,... You can not watch a movie a day with that limit. If someone wants to buy a movie a day from your service they quite simply can't. Your consumers can not buy as much as they want. Or they end up paying twice. One euro for that gb they downloaded on top of the price of the movie. In other words not competitive with your local video shop. Capped internet is putting a bottleneck at the advancement of internet services. With the current limits in Belgium online movie watching or streamed is not feasible. Piracy might rise with uncapped internet but you're not going to get any more money from online services to fill your pockets either.

Every single, new game that's released on steam is a lot more expensive then I can find them at a retail shop (play.com). If you save $10 on shipping costs you can damn well make your downloadable game price match a retail version.

Upgrading the system won't suddenly make a smart admin. I'd be surprised if those deadlocks solve themselves with an upgrade.

Ubbenl gb rapbqvat!

Those statistics could also tell us that 90% of all people have their birthday on the first of january.

We could introduce mindgame.

I've bought the original Fallout games from gog.com a few months ago. And thanks to the lack of DRM you can't deactivate those anymore!