An important personal note to the FG guys

[Fred]

Kind of overreacting with Valve, huh? There is new material for L4D coming aswell as L4D2. I think Valve are great, they've sold Half Life for 1$, all their games for like 80$ and lots of crazy stuff. That you can give games as gifts in case you buy several is also great.
They usually have really long spaces between their games so freaking out just about L4D2 sounds stupid and I most certainly don't think they are ignoring the community.

Unless you come from Europe please do not try to go against the people complaining about the currency issue. Until the currency introduction I would have defended Valve just as much as you're doing right now.

We pay 130 dollars for all their games while you pay 80 dollars for them, crazy stuff indeed.

To date they have not said a single thing about the currency issue (games costing 19.99 dollars for US or 44.99 euros for Europe, which is 64 dollars), while they definitely should have.

Take a look for yourself if you can't believe it:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/17460/?cc=be (Europe, Belgium)
http://store.steampowered.com/app/17460/?cc=us

I gave Valve nearly a year to fix this mess and they have only made it worse with L4D2, and it doesn't seem they will be balancing the prices anytime soon as the product above has been priced like that ever since it got on Steam.

I will stop using digital distribution as it's only letting me down more and more lately. I will go back to buying games retail (online as well) as it's cheaper for me, and will hopefully discover more good companies like Frictional Games soon unless EA screws it up again (R.I.P. Westwood Studios and Bullfrog Games).

PS: It's not L4D2 alone, the censorship that has been going on in the currency thread, the quality of certain products on Steam (RTCW is not up-to-date, I bought it to play it online just to see I couldn't play on the most recent servers and I did not have the ability to update it myself, but this is just one example).