Civ 5 Special Edition announced

[H Tower]

Personally, I cant understand the logic of these tiered, "special", releases.

Fan boys who stand in line at Best Buy the night before so they can be the first to buy the "special" edition at 10am the next day.

[wodan11]

It's not just that, though that's part of it.

The way the market works (not just software, but retail in general) is based on releases and shelf space. If you release a new product, you get top billing (on the "new releases" shelf) which is prominent and usually in the front of the store or section of the store. You also get more presence... usually the store will get a big shipment and will put all the product out on the shelves, whereas older releases slowly and slowly diminish as the inventory is bought, until just a couple of copies are all that's there. More presence = greater chance to catch the eye of causal shoppers.

A lot of retail buying decisions are done by distributors or store chain buyers (which amount to the same thing as distributors, really). The distributors then push the product to their customers, the retailers. Retailers often don't have the expertise or time to make informed buying decisions so they just get X amount of a new product from the distributor, whatever it is. So, the distributor automatically gets a new product and feeds it on down the chain.

Furthermore, industry buzz and marketing hype also revolve around releases. When a new product is released, articles are written about it, and such.

Internet / online marketing works much the same way. While there's no "shelf space", absolutely there is still a "new sales rack" = front page of the website.

[Beatie]

Since you can play steam game offline perhaps it's not as bad as we think. It's still better to play withoud steam and just place your disc into your pc and install and play the game, but who knows we might like it. It's easy to instal a steam game on any computer you have and also easy to update. And that special version sh*t? I don't like the idea to have different versions online. Just money making.

Steam version? what about mod makers? I don't think is friendly to mod makers on steam.. if that is true one more reason to buy a regular copy of the game (if possible)