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EA confirms Dragon Age 2 DLC caused Steam removal
by Steve Watts, Jul 28, 2011 7:30am PDTEA has confirmed in a statement that Dragon Age 2 was pulled from Steam due to a conflict with Valve's new policy on downloadable content. We suspected as much yesterday when the story broke, but EA senior VP of global e-commerce David DeMartini puts the reasoning in no uncertain terms, even calling Steam's policies "restrictive."
At EA, we offer our games and content to all major download services including GameStop, Amazon, Direct2Drive and Steam. 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. We hope to work out an agreement to keep our games on Steam.
Left unsaid are the exact terms of Steam's new policy. As reported yesterday, the new terms seem to restrict games from being sold if their associated DLC can't be sold directly through Steam. Dragon Age 2 (and Crysis 2 before it) sold new content with BioWare Points, and were yanked from the service. The word "new" is important, because games can apparently use the same DLC distribution system and be grandfathered in, as long as they don't introduce any new downloadable content.
It's all a bit muddy at the moment, and it's good to know that EA is at least attempting to work out an agreement with Valve. In the meantime, fans will have to grab certain EA games elsewhere.
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EA has issued a statement regarding the removal of Dragon Age 2 from Steam, confirming that it's due to "restrictive" DLC policies from Valve.
EA has issued a statement regarding the removal of Dragon Age 2 from Steam, confirming that it's due to "restrictive" DLC policies from Valve. : Shacknews
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However I basically trust EA to do nothing right by me. Their entire modus operandi in recent history is to making decisions the effectively fuck over most consumers in an effort to squeeze a few more pennies out of those very same consumers.
They have some good games on the horizon so I really hope they don't keep fucking things up, but I find it quite difficult to support any of their decisions, especially regarding Steam currently. It took Steam years to become a good service and Valve already had a good track record when that started.
EA, on the other hand, has an atrocious track record and are going out of their way to force Origin down consumers throats. Maybe the service will end up being good, god knows EA has the resources to deliver, I simply don't trust them to do so.
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