Let the digital war begin! It looks like the big dog of Digital Downloads Steam is banging heads with the Big Dog of Distributiona nd publishing EA games. With Crysis 2 removed from Steam and EA confirming its big titles will be heading for distribution on Origin, looks like nothing but confusion ahead for gamers…
At first i had heard that Battlefield 3 was looking like it was headed for an exclusive digital distribution release on Origin, EA’s replacement to the EA Download Manager. Now it looks like Crysis 2 has been pulled from Steam and the Crysis 2 site is claiming that the game is available “Only on Origin”.
The Escapist writes
“EA plans to have more than 150 games ready to purchase when Origin goes live, the most high-profile of which at this point has to be Star Wars: The Old Republic. “In the case of Star Wars we’re trying to build an audience for Origin. And it’s also an opportunity for us to better manage the downloads and how we bring people over from the beta and that sort of thing. For a lot of reasons it made sense for an MMO, which is a highly complex deployment,” EA Games President Frank Gibeau told GamesIndustry.
“I think long-term you’ll see we believe in reach so we will have other digital retailers for our products because we want to reach as many audiences as possible,” he continued. “But at the same time if we can use exclusive content or other ideas to help grow our audience then we’re going to do that because we’re growing a platform.”
So while initial thoughts were that EA pulled Crysis 2 from Steam, it now looks like it was actually Valve that ditched Crysis 2..
“It’s unfortunate that Steam has removed Crysis 2 from their service. This was not an EA decision or the result of any action by EA, Steam has imposed a set of business terms for developers hoping to sell content on that service – many of which are not imposed by other online game services. Unfortunately, Crytek has an agreement with another download service which violates the new rules from Steam and resulted in its expulsion of Crysis 2 from Steam.”
In my opinion we need all the online stores we can get, while Steam is a great service, letting one company get too big is never good for the consumer. While don’t really like EA at the best of times, i would feel better knowing that Steam has competition. The problem is, I am really looking forward to Battlefield 3 and i have a feeling that i it wont be a matter of choice if i want to use Origin, but a matter of you either use Origin, or you dont play…thats the worst kind of choice there is….
Slms.
