Electronic Arts has confirmed it will not be releasing Battlefield 3 through Valve's Steam distribution service. Storm in a teacup, or reason to be worried?
News dropped overnight that Battlefield 3 - the game that pretty much every PC FPS fan is waiting for - is not coming to the platform's biggest digital dsitribution platform. BF3, it appears, will not be available on Steam.
Despite the platform's reach, maturity and established ease-of-use, Electronic Arts is staying away from Steam because "Steam has adopted a set of restrictive terms of service which limit how developers interact with customers to deliver patches and other downloadable content", it said in a post on the EA Forums.
At first flush, this would appear a move designed to boost EA's own digital service, Origin, but EA's gone on to say that Battlefield 3 will be offered in "over 100 digital retailers worldwide", but that's Steam's requirements are simply too draconian. What those exact requirements are, neither EA or Valve are mentioning yet.
Now, EA may well have very good reasons for this, but the truth is that not a lot of gamers have huge faith in EA when it comes to this kind of thing. It's patching of games like Bad Company 2 has been hit and miss, especially in the early days, while its DRM efforts have left a bad taste in the mouths of many a gamer.
And then there's also the simple fact that Steam is pretty much ubiquitous, and many gamers' preferred platform, not only for games, but as the social glue that keeps gaming communities together.
Whether this will be enough to change people's minds on the purchase is hard to say. We're still planning to give up a large portion of our life (not to mention sleep, food and so on) to the game, but for many we expect this to be bit of a gamechanger.
So what do you guys think? Will this turn off the Steam-fans out there from getting BF3?
Issue: 137 | June, 2012