thing, since THQ has to sell the game to retailers here - a higher Steam price would make it easier to convince brick and mortar retailers to stock PC units of the game. US$89.99 for Call of Duty: Black Ops on Steam. 'Stuff that' I said, and picked it up for US$44.96 off of Direct2Drive. I just waited for Direct2Drive to give me the 'CD-key' for the game which I activated in Steam and let it download the game through there. So just how on earth did the publisher setting such a high price for us Aussies save the retailers there? The reason Steam has similar pricing at times is purely to protect the retail relationship. Retailers will be much less inclined to buy PC versions of games if they know their customers can get the game on steam for 2/3s of the price. They know a lot less customers will buy the retail version if the steam version is much cheaper. Steam and D2D are being forced by the publishers to charge the higher price. Steam and D2D would want to sell at a lower price, so that they get more of the Retail market. They don't care if it is an Aussie, Yank or Uzbekistani who buys the game from them. But they do care when the Publisher say "You will not sell to these guys, or you will set the price to this. Otherwise we will stop letting you sell our games". Well, the Classification board certainly