What part of what I said was bullshit? The mouse-wheel zoom is a blurring of the pixels, no way around it, you can see it, you can't scale 2d games correctly (not upscaling) without increasing the visible map size. Also, the new GUI is designed specifically to be scalable to any resolution, which is why it looks so low-res and ugly at higher res.

Also notice how huge it is, how big the buttons are? Yeah it wasn't at all designed for tablets... Straight from the horse's mouth: Also note that Beamdog fervently denied that they were ever going to put it on Steam, so it's pretty obvious BGEE's original sales pre-steam bombed.

How you interpret what he is saying and what he is actually saying are two different things:

1. The answer was to people that wanted to know whether they would get keys for the version on Steam if they had already purchased the game from Beamdog
2. Complaining that Steam gets a bigger share of the sale price than they do is quite legitimate. Hardly means anything about overall sales figures

No, they didn't put it on Steam and didn't plan it, it was Atari's move.

Poor bastards. It's $11.99 for me on Steam. :P

And I wonder why they did, hmmmm

like i said, the Steam product page makes no mention of any account activation. and according to a recent PC Gamer news post, no Beamdog account is required and the Steam edition does indeed NOT have cloud saves.

mind you, cloud saves aren't really all that important to me, but i say that for €19 full SteamWorks integration should have been the least you could expect from this release. this is just lazy.

he should take it up with Atari since Valve takes only some 30% as commission, while physical retail is more like 50%. this fact has been emphasized in Steam's favour by many small developer studios and by indie studios.
looks like Oster sucks at negotiating.

same difference. Oster obviously thought it would draw people to Beamdog, when nobody in PC gaming wants yet another service/client. Atari, on the other hand, is concerned with making the game profitable, so it's not a stretch to imagine that the Beamdog release didn't sell much and Atari had to put it on Steam (and GamersGate, by the way) to get some decent sales out of it.

Ukrainian prices for Ukrainian wages. sounds fair to me. what sucks is Europeans (or Americans) earning European wages but wanting to pay Ukrainian prices. fucking vultures.

Have to admire Atari, they seem to keep a good grip on their IP's while still getting it out there.

It's amazing they still have it, I figured they lost the rights to all D&D stuff with that court case with Hasbro, but I guess BGEE remaining with Atari must have been part of the settlement, Baldur's Gate here on GOG is published by Hasbro.

And I'm living in a country with Ukrainian wages and have to pay German prices :-(

yeah, that sucks. but normally, regional pricing makes sense.

but doesn't Poland - in general - have a higher standard of living (and thus wages) than Ukraine?

Yeah, it has, I exaggerated.

But average salary is around 900 EUR (before taxes). Minimum wage is 350 EUR before tax.

and games cost €50?!? that IS crazy.

Games in retail stores are sold for around 25-30 EUR here (premiere date), sometimes a little more. But yeah, we have 60 EUR initial prices on steam.

We could probably get the same tier as Russians, but we are in EU, so we have EU tier prices. EU tier 2, I think, because BG:EE is 13.99 EUR here.

Is that because Poland puts a consumption tax on-top of the online sales? I notice that the Triple-A games that get published over here in Aus are always 10$ or so more than US price, which seems about right for our sales tax

Does this have an option to disable/enable the additional content?

As a purist I don't really see the appeal of adding anything more then original cut content.