Exactly. With the consoles, they have to pay more for their distribution (alongside production, they have the disc purchase, disc printing, transfer cost of pressing the discs, writing and publishing the inside materials, the case, artwork design (although that one applies to Steam too), and case purchasing.......and transportation costs, possible tax duties if sent overseas, dealing with faulty discs being sent back and the absorbed cost of defective product being a waste of resources etc., not to mention the lost revenue from people 'Mr. Big'ing games), so they have to make more in order to turn a profit, hence why games purchased online are cheaper (even on consoles, yet many seem reluctant to do this for big names), but also why many companies are now turning to online distribution networks, such as Steam. Plus, Steam makes advertising a lot easier and cheaper as you target the key market of gamers right there and then, because it encompasses a massive diversity of gaming fans in terms of genres, and it costs next to nothing to send them all that news pop up that appears every now and again - hell, even I in my infinite wisdom and hatred for most adverts click on games I've never heard of once in a while. Who before the news on Steam had heard of Alpha Protocol?
But the updates are not free for the company, they still have to pay labor for creating the patch/update/new content, and then the bandwidth fee for sending it out, so that counts against the profit. But normally, aside from bug fixing, extra content only arrives for games that sell well and make a massive profit to begin with - the free market truly at work. They are free for us to keep us playing their game and increase the chance of passing out the word to other people that their game is awesome....and it stops us from buying other peoples games, depriving them of money. Why do you thing CoD released its map pack on the same day as BC2?
BTW, the long version of why Activision charged for the CoD DLC on PC will keep me here until midday, so the short version is - They are money grabbing humps and they knew that those who wanted to play BC2 would do so even if it was free DLC, but those staying would stay for the long haul, and thusly would pay anything to stay with the main in-crowd, so they charged for it to exploit it's biggest fans. And that is why I never get attached to anything that isn't Summer Glau. And yes, you can quote and bend that sentence all you want.
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