EA has a big holiday season a head of them with the much anticipated release of Battlefield 3, that apparently will not be available on Valve’s PC game download service, Steam. EA announced via Twitter stating that “BF2 will not be available on Steam as the service restricts our ability to directly support players.”
On their forum post, it goes a bit more into detail in explaining the publishers position. “Steam has adopted a set of restrictive terms of service which limit how developers interact with customers to deliver patches and other downloadable content,” said a rep on the forums. “No other download service has adopted these practices.” Similar to Dragon Age 2, they reference one specific part of Steam’s Terms of Service agreement, which forces games to deliver DLC and patches through Steam rather than through a game-specific client. EA claims this to be restrictive, and thus refuses to sell some titles through the service.\
We do not know for sure the reason why EA has made this move as Steam has always had this in their TOS, but they have said they hope to work out the issue with Valve in the future. However, until that is fixed the eager gamers can download the game from over 100 digital retailers.
Source: Joystiq
Chris Hernandez
I’m assuming Steam takes a cut of the DLC purchased through their system and EA would want to avoid that if it is the case.
Rian Quenlin
I’m 100% certain they do. Pardon the Hell out of them for wanting to fund an excellent business model.