14 DAY TRIAL // Dragon Age II, the role-playing and action mix that has been developed by BioWare and published by Electronic Arts, is no longer available from the Steam digital distribution service that has been created and is maintained by Valve.
The disappearance act comes just as fans of the series and the game universe was set to receive the Legacy downloadable content, which is the first major update to the game in terms of gameplay and story and allows players to see some of Hawke's past and the events that have made him the man (or woman) that he is.
When it comes to the PC version of Dragon Age II, players have an option to pick up the Legacy DLC entirely from the game, without using the Steam interface and without passing by the Steam checkout service.
This means that Valve does not get a part of the price a player pays for the Legacy DLC.
It seems that publisher Electronic Arts is determined to introduce this kind of in-game store in a lot of future titles, which means that we might see more EA games missing from Steam in the near future.
Crysis 2, which was developed by Crytek and published via the partners program by Electronic Arts, was affected by the same problem and was also dropped from Steam.
Steam has recently introduced conditions in the Terms of Service that effectively ban in-game stores, probably because of its new interest in free-to-play titles.
Initially, the two companies failed to clearly communicate the reasons and a lot of players speculated that EA is trying to get a number of games to launch exclusively on its own new Origin digital distribution service.
Dragon Age: Origins, the first game in the BioWare fantasy series, is still available through Steam.
Those who already own Dragon Age II on Steam are able to play their game and get Legacy.