Well wargames afaik have always had steeper prices, that don't drop at anywhere near the rate of other titles.
I'm guessing there just isn't a big enough market for the genre, or that is the perception at least. BFC have some bizzare fear of steam from what I've seen. Personally I think it could boost their sales to an enormous degree. Even if the genre is niche, they would bag plenty of sales off of just "looks mildly interesting" folks. But it's not my company on the line so my assumptions could be wrong.
1C wargames seem to be an exception (thinking of the Graviteam games)---it would be interesting to compare sales figures and see who is more profitable.
BFC benefit from having basically zero competition, so at this point they can do whatever they want. And frankly, as long they continue to improve their engine---albeit slowly---I'll keep paying for it. If they went off the deep end and stripped out multiplayer features and just focused entirely on expanding the available OOB---I wouldn't.
I buy a lot more games than I used to thanks to Steam's constant stream of crazy sales, but I haven't spent a fraction of the time I have on any given steam game that I do on CM or Command Ops series, so I'm willing to pay a premium for it. (huge exceptions being DOTA 2 and ROOST---but the former is free and the latter came out before steam sales went bonkers). If Festung Europa turns out to be a "true" successor to DH/ROOST (I'm not saying RO2 isn't---it's just not what I was looking for personally) I would easily be willing to pay $100 for it---if it's really that good. A shortage of time is more an issue for me than a shortage of money for games. Plus I haven't upgraded my PC in ages because with the exception of the new IL2, ARMA, and Dark Souls series there aren't really any games that I think are worth it.
Obviously, if some big competitor enters the field it will benefit the consumer. But right now, that just isn't a reality. Even the AP series is not really a direct competitor to CM in my view, it plays quite differently, and does not allow the extreme precision (in handing out orders) that CMx1 or CMx2 do. That also means it's much less of a workload to play as well, but I don't find that worth the loss of control, and CMx2 is slowly becoming more user friendly.
BTW, to anyone interested, BFC usually release a game within about 2 months of announcing it---they don't follow most of the industry's pattern in this regard: this should be out by mid March.