Over the past several months, there have been issues with a number of EA games and Steam. Battlefield 3, EA’s biggest game this year, has never been available for pre-order through the digital games distributor, and several EA games have been pulled from the store. EA blames this on restrictive terms of service, while Valve has remained quiet. Valve boss Gabe Newell has finally spoken out on the situation, explaining that he wants EA’s games on the service and is hoping to convince EA to bring them back.
“I don’t think Valve can pick just one thing and think the issue would go away if we fixed that,” he told Develop. “We have to show EA it’s a smart decision to have EA games on Steam, and we’re going to try to show them that.”
EA has tried to position things as if the games’ absence is entirely the fault of Valve, which operates Steam. Prior to stating that Battlefield isn’t on Steam because of the ToS, EA pointed out that Steam was preventing it from staying in touch with customers in the way it wants to. It has also highlighted the fact that the game is available elsewhere as evidence that it offers its games to all distributors.
