If you’ve checked Steam today you may have noticed a weird absence of new releases from EA. Reddit Gaming and a few other sites have mentioned that EA is not going to release titles through Steam anymore. With no official word from the guys at EA we are left to mainly speculation. This does, however, raise a great many questions. If they’re leaving Steam why are their titles still available on Amazon, Direct 2 Drive, and other download services? If this were simply about pushing their customers to Origin wouldn’t they leave the other services behind as well? What break down in negotiation lead EA to pull products specifically from Steam, and why would you pull from one of if not the biggest digital distribution source for PC gaming?
Steam has a huge following of loyal gamers, how is this going to effect sales of major EA titles on the PC side? The die hards will download BF3 through Origin, that’s their game and they have to play it. But with a noticeable absence of Battlefield, Mass Effect 3, The Old Republic, and other future titles will the PC sales for those titles suffer? Games like Alice, that appeal mainly to the die-hard gamer and not as much casual seem to be the ones that will suffer the most.
This seems to me to be as big as releasing an album strictly on Amazon MP3, or a Universal Records based site simply to avoid iTunes. You may not like iTunes, but your album is all but required to be on their service to be purchased by the masses. I think EA is taking a huge gamble in leaving behind a wide audience for a smaller one. What casual gamer or even hobbyist is going to download yet another piece of software to play a title, when there are thousands on their existing distribution source. What about the guys that look for weekend sales, or wait for all their community friends to jump on before they grab it? Did the developers have any say in this change, or is this strictly an EA based move. Did Dice, BioWare, Spicy Horse, or anyone else being published by EA get input into the matter or did they make an executive decision. There are a lot of questions to this change to be answered by EA, and hopefully we’ll here from them soon.
Currently the only title that we can confirm is no longer available that was previously is Crysis 2. If they’re leaving Steam behind why are their older titles still on the market? This may just be a glitch in the system but the vibe seems more serious than that.
I’m not sure if EA is necessarily shooting themselves in the foot on this one. Steam is a huge power, but EA may be able to overcome that. I don’t understand would they risk it when they have guaranteed sales through Steam. We’ll let you know if EA makes any official announcement, or responds to our questions about the change.
What do you readers think? Does downloading Origin seem like an unnecessary hassle, or is it an easy change for you?
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