Gather said:
I think you, and most people responding here, are kind of naive about this. I think this probably has less to do with Valve than the European nations involved. I don't know the specific problems, since there are a lot that could apply, but the bottom line is that there are a lot of reasons why things are so much more expensive in europe, which you can find if you like google the question or whatever. A lot of it basically boils down to bureaucracy, trade agreements, and what goverments think their fair share is. Goverments also tend to conspire to try and export as much as possible to bring in money, while importing as little as possible to avoid paying out money, products coming in from the outside are oftentimes charged heavily to make it so domestic products have an advantage. One of the things about the USA is that we're unusually open to outside products, and it's relatively cheap to bring your stuff into our market to sell. It's complicated but while our prices are relatively low it's at the root of a lot of the complaints about how America produces very little of it's own anymore, and how foreign businesses are ripping American ones to pieces even in our local markets.
At any rate, from the very beginnings of online trade there have been HUGE issues with people using the internet and the boom in postal services (along with the guaranteed privacy of post in most nations) to bypass trade laws and agreements. Right now sales taxes are just starting to catch up with The Internet as not paying tax is one of the big things that helped companies like Amazon get going (at least in the US). There were also massive issues over things like "Second Life" and virtual currencies being run concurrantly with real ones that could be traded for real money reliably.
See, I don't know how much the goverments in question are getting out of this right now. STEAM probably set some kind of international deal with the european nations, and pays money to distribute into those countries which is part of the price. Those prices might also include some built in fees that go to the goverment directly. By going for lower prices internationally the goverment is losing it's cut, and of course they are going to blame STEAM for allowing people to do it.
This kind of logic is at the heart of things like region locked movies and such, to make it more difficult to trade media by backdoor channels so the goverment can both keep an eye on the content and make sure their censorship laws are enforced as much as possible, and also ensure they get their cut of the money based on the rules they set for their market.
I'm guessing what happened was that this guy was rather public about what he was doing, and someone in a position of authority in the EU complained, and by agreement STEAM pretty much has to take action for someone bypassing the system they put in place.
The simple existance of differant systems (european, asian, American, etc...) for online services says a lot. The companies involved don't do it because they want to, it would be a heck of a lot easier to just run one giant site and convert money like Paypal does. But given all the differant regional laws both for content, and trade fees, they have to seperate things to be complaint with each area they want to deal with.
In short, I don't think the issue os Steam's greed, or them being upset over losing money. I doubt they pocket the differance in price. I can be very critical of Steam... and well the entire gaming industry, but this is an issue where I actually don't think they are at fault.
If you don't like prices where you are, you should probably complain to the goverment, especially if the issue is foreign goods being too expensive (most video games probably not being produced in your country). On the other hand this may or may not go anywhere even if a lot of people do it, because there is atually a massive downside to bringing in cheap foreign goods, and it's at the root of a lot of the problems here in the USA.
The game industry as a whole (not Steam/Valve specifically) also bears some responsibility, largely because their price fixing means that even with domestic games that could be sold cheaper in a lot of countries, the price is probably being inflated to match the outside ones coming in, in order to prevent direct competition. The domestic game companies benefitting from this when they sell internationally.
