I thought EA were getting in bed with Valve over this... Seems weird they would start pulling games when they were on about a merger only a few months back

Still, it's interesting they are pushing against Valve/Steam I don't think it will really happen though. Origin just isn't that nice

Wouldn't surprise me, it's not a move that will really work to get that many more customers. It will be interesting to see if Valve does anything about who publishes their retail games if EA are suddenly deciding to be very competitive.

It would seem in EA's interests to keep it's games on steam, their prices tend to be quite high on steam anyway? I'm not really sure I haven't looked at the price of crysis 2 etc yet.

The prices on Steam are set by the publishers, not Valve. The reason they're expensive is because the publishers have to tow the line to brick and mortar store demands about pricing (ie they can't undercut B+M thus it ends up being ~RRP most the time). Unfortunately, they have to care about B+M because of the console market that those publishers care about (if it was just the PC games then I think it would be quite likely that the publishers would just ignore B+M stores).

Is EA under new management or something recently? They seem to be making terrible decisions a lot more often

They suddenly realised that Activision had stolen their "big bad" crown and wanted it back.

lets just hope EA fades away and dies, they've never gotten anything right.

I don't know, they seemed to do some good a couple of years ago, then lost it again. I was hoping to see more new IP with interesting concepts from them, like Mirror's Edge.

ME2 could be good, pre-order and gain the ability to free run!

I got confused there thinking you were on about preordering Mass Effect 2

*headdesk* that is all

I'm not sure if that's a response to me or the whole thread, could be both

Just "PC is now a console gaming"

I think Ky was telling me earlier Crysis 2 was removed from Steam by Valve not EA. Because of some contractual issue with it being released on other download platforms or something... Basically Valve made some new rules on how/what could be sold and Crysis 2 broke some of them so they took it down...

That's from the EA press release. They don't state what the rule was or how it was broken.

I would personally guess that Valve have been putting "all DLC must be available through Steam" conditions in the contracts recently (as they've been pushing DLC and their microtransaction system more recently, makes sense that the contracts changed a few months ago), and some DLC has been announced as Origin exclusive. At any rate, I would not be surprised in the slightest if this is a deliberate breakage of contract to get their games off Steam (their biggest competitor) while getting to blame Valve. Pure speculation though.

Dragon Age 2 has just disappeared from Steam. Seems like it is a DLC issue - there was some DLC released yesterday.

I really like some EA games and franchises, but seriously the EA head department and marketing heads should really be sacked, such stupid ideas recently. I don't even mind ea trying to make their own thing as long as they still either release on steam or have some incentive to use their system.

I think Valve would want stick with EA for retail disc release simply because EA's partners program is actually pretty good and can deal with the volume they would need, otherwise it is just wasteful to do it themselves or get some smaller company (paradox?) to be able to cope with the volume for the consoles.

I don't think this tiff will affect disc publishing of Valve titles - the deal they have there is too good to pass up on both sides.

Still, this issue with the games being removed strikes me as a very bad move by EA - a lot of PC gamers these days don't care for games not on Steam, and I don't think many of the games EA are releasing now are really good enough for people to care about (maybe BF3, but they've done some bad moves with that recently, so not being on Steam will hurt, and maybe TOR, but now people are seeing the gameplay trailers they don't seem happy).

Gabe Newell speaks: http://www.develop-online.net/news/3847 ... -come-back

TL;DR: Not much new information, except that Newell wants to convince EA that it is worth having their games on Steam.