Gameitall 
The big news of the Week it seems, is that EA’s most anticipated game, Battlefield 3 will not be sold using Valves simplistic money grabber, Steam. Taking to Twitter and its own forums, EA announced as much with some interesting, if not inflammatory, claims. “BF3 will not be available on Steam as the service restricts our ability to directly support players.”
The forum post goes a bit further in explaining the publisher’s 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,” the forum post reads. “No other download service has adopted these practices.” This is in reference to one specific part of Steam’s Terms of Service agreement, which was an issue with EA and Bioware’s PC version of Dragon Age 2 Legacy DLC, 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.
It remains unclear why EA — who, in the past, has offered a variety of games through Steam, regardless of the Terms of Service — refuses to offer DLC and patches through Steam suddenly, but it certainly appears to be a stance the company is staying firm on. The forum post also notes EA’s inclination towards resolving the issue with Valve, saying, “We hope to work out an agreement where Steam can carry Battlefield 3; meanwhile, gamers can pick from the more than 100 digital retailers.”
So who agrees with me that EA just did a bad move. Concidering Steam, being one of the biggest Digital Download clients on the net with 25 Million users as of 2009 and is much more accessible then EA’s own Download manager Origin. I’m expecting to see a fallout of angry fans attacking the EA forums very soon.
