If Steam is NOT to blame for pricing, then either Interplay hates Steam with passion, or Valve's people responsible for negotaiting with distributors are totally incompetent for this EWJ pricing.

but you can't play non-valve games while not logged in. and looking at a steam guy funny will get your login disabled.

Or Interplay are desperately clawing in every penny as they fight for their continued existence through the courts.
Answer me this: how would Steam be responsible for the pricing of games through Steam? How would that work exactly? I'd love to be able to understand the mentality of people who think that publishers just throw games at Valve and leave the details to them.

This is a possibility too, but then why they don't force GOG to raise prices?
They probably tell to the distributor: we want this big cut from the money and we won't sell it for less than XY. Take it or GTFO, we have plenty of other distributors to choose from.
EDIT: and if Interplay is that desperate for money, they will accept it.

It's not like Steam doesn't get a cut of every game sold.
I would imagine that there's a base price that they must sell the game for, and then there's an amount that steam is allowed to choose as their profit from that list.

GOG have fixed prices. Interplay could pull them from sale, or sell 1&2 individually but ultimately they don't have the flexibility that they have with Steam in regard to pricing.
Then why don't they do that with many games that are sold for next to nothing on Steam? Why would they pick on Interplay? Why would they demonstrate such an atrocious attitude towards Interplay when most other publishers praise the Steam staff they deal with for their friendliness and helpfulness? This is just bullshit and you know it.

Pure baseless speculation without an ounce of fact. All too easily discarded as the bullshit it is. If there's a base price then why are some games so fucking cheap? Why have titles been reduced to mere pennies through sales?
The strange thing is, what you wrote is far more true of GOG. At least here there IS a base price that publisher must sell at.

Well, there are ways that you can get Valve games without Steam, but not legally, and if you do get dodgy copies then you risk not being able to get on some servers. I don't know how easy this is to do, either, cause I've never tried.
Steam has some positives, like keeping the games up to date and giving one interface with which to buy games, play games, chat to players, find online servers, etc.
However, if I could get Valve games (like the Half Life series, Portal, Left 4 Dead, Counter-Strike, etc) then I would probably prefer it so that I have my own copy kept for myself that doesn't need the Steam client to work or be activated. Even so, even if I could get the games installed without Steam I'd probably link them to Steam for the client interface.
Basically, I just don't like how my games are utterly dependent on the Steam service existing, so to limit this I've only used Steam for Valve games.

Um, then where would the money go? obviously I'm using the retail theory and applying it to Steam, there is a base price that the publisher says they must sell at and then the retailer or whoever marks it up a bit. A suggested sale price is not baseless speculation..

Retailers mark it up a LOT. Enough to make Steam's 40% look almost generous by comparison. Although, to be fair, they've usually got numerous premises and staff and other bills to pay. At retail publishers must sell at their games at a certain price because otherwise they won't cover production, distribution and other costs associated with retail releases.
That is not the case with digital distribution.

Obviously, but Dragon Age via them is the same at retail.

Yup, and that's why I don't buy anything there : I mean, it's already scandalous to pay 50% margin to a retailer for a box in a store, with the publisher getting 25% and game dev having like 10% (the rest is transport and package), but I just CAN'T stand these prices and "business model" when it comes down to digital distro.
So I use only "indie" systems like GOG or Impulse, that suck less money for sh-tty marketing and such, and give more to the devs. Or even preferably I got the game direct from the dev when possible (for M&B, Armageddon Empires...).

Via who and in what way the same and in what way does this have any relevance to anything?

meaning that the markup that retail stores isn't the same behind what you get thru digital. I.E. your example you spoke about shipping fees and the like, that retail stores have to pay and that steam doesn't.yes, it was me.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEEUtdhV_eA