UK Games Retailers Threaten Boycott of Steam Games

RogueyWon writes "Games industry trade site MCV is reporting that two major UK video games retailers are threatening to ban Steam-enabled PC games from their stores. The as-yet-unnamed retailers are apparently concerned that by selling Steam games, they are pointing their customers towards a competitor and will by trying to bring pressure upon publishers to strip Steam functionality from their games. This could prove an interesting test of where the real power lies at the retail end of PC gaming."

Strange

[lennier1]

Why do I get the feeling they'll still find a way to somehow blame this on piracy?

Re:Structural Unemployment for Middle Men

[DavidTC]

A disk is like a flash drive, but it's much bigger and write-only, and you need a special port on your computer to use it.

Re:Okay... but you miss the point

[mrbongo]

ok shoot stuff, shit stuff same difference...

Re:Okay...

[Zerimar]

But Valve (and to a lesser degree, Blizzard) is almost single handedly keeping PC Gaming alive and well. Steam has been amazing for the PC gaming ecosystem - especially for the little guys. Does World of Goo get noticed without Steam? Probably not. Defense Grid? I doubt it. Puzzle Quest and it's derivatives? Nope. Crayon Physics? No. Plants vs Zombies took off with help from Steam as well, although Popcap is a fairly large developer at this point. I'm against DRM as much as the next guy, but I stick up for Valve and Steam. So far they have a proven track record of being very customer friendly as well as being fairly developer friendly. They are unique in that they seem to be the only company doing AAA cross platform games that puts the PC first. When developers like Bioware are making their PC games feel like ports (and stripping features as in Dragon Age: Origins 2), Valve is still out there supporting Team Fortress 2, and the Left4Dead series first and foremost on the PC.