14 DAY TRIAL // Yesterday we reported that Dragon Age II was taken out of the Steam store just as publisher Electronic Arts and developer BioWare were launching the Legacy downloadable content for it.
The official reason is that Legacy can be obtained directly from the game, without using the Steam checkout process, which means that Valve does not get a cut from the revenue that Electronic Arts derives from Dragon Age II content.
A statement from Electronic Arts reads “Unfortunately, Steam has adopted a set of restrictive terms of service which limit how developers interact with customers to sell downloadable content. No other download service has adopted this practice. Consequently some of our games have been removed by Steam.”
Further down the line, EA adds that, “We hope to work out an agreement to keep our games on Steam.”
This is pretty much the same language that the publisher has also used when Crysis 2 disappeared from Steam.
Then a number of gamers rushed to see the move as an effort to make the Origin digital distribution service more attractive by putting a number of titles exclusively on it.
But Crysis 2 is still offered on a number of rival services like Impulse, Direct2Drive and GamerGate and EA, making it clear that the problem was not one of exclusivity but one linked to how Steam’s terms of service were formulated.
Steam has not yet formulated an official response about taking Dragon Age II off the service and have also not said whether they are interested in modifying their deal with publishers in order to avoid similar situations in the future.
Steam is at the moment the biggest digital distribution service on the PC, but Electronic Arts seems determined to challenge that dominance with its new Origin concept, which is set to offer more than just ways of downloading titles and will be expanding its social features.