Stupid News: EA’s Battlefield 3 will NOT be on Valve’s Steam

EA recently confirmed that its newest title Battlefield 3, the next entry in the long-running Battlefield series, will not be heading to Valve’s Steam platform.  It will be available on every other digital download service, like Direct2Drive. The reason they gave for taking this course of action was rather vague.  According to a statement released from an EA spokesperson,

“Unfortunately, Steam has adopted a set of restrictive terms of service which limit how developers interact with customers to deliver patches and other downloadable content. No other download service has adopted these practices.”

While the statement doesn’t go into detail about what these “terms of service” that “limit how developers interact with customers” are, I assume it has something to do with Dragon Age II and Crysis 2 being pulled from Steam about a month ago.  You see, EA wants to deliver DLC directly to gamers.  Surely, if EA can sell DLC directly to the consumer via the game, why worry about having it go through Steam and, more importantly to EA, worry about having to cut Steam in on the profits?

Due to this ongoing disagreement between EA and Valve it appears that BF3 won’t be coming to Steam any time soon.  Especially now that EA has revealed that any retail or digital copy of BF3, regardless of where it was purchased, will require the Origin client for authentication and initialization. Hopefully, EA will discover in time that cutting their game out of the largest digital distribution platform in the history of gaming may not be the smartest move in their play book.  Especially when they’re trying to 1UP the “shall not be named” of the FPS world.  You know, the one that is on Steam?