EA’s Big Return to Steam is Underway
Some big news this week concerning the rebuilt relationship between Electronic Arts and Valve’s Steam digital storefront:
Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ: EA) launched the first wave of 25+ EA games on Steam, with more on the way. Starting today, players can explore BioWare™’s award-winning Role-Playing Games – Dragon Age™: Inquisition and Dragon Age II, experience high-speed, white-knuckle driving action in Need for Speed™ Heat, Need for Speed: Rivals and Need for Speed (2016) and battle it out in the wacky, fun and over-the-top shooter, Plants vs. Zombies: Battle for Neighborville™. A selection of the bold and innovative games from EA’s indie development partners like Unravel, Unravel II, Fe and Sea of Solitude will also become available. Additionally, these games and many others will be available as part of an EA Access subscription on Steam that will launch to players later this summer.
“We want to make it easy to play the games you love, wherever you want to play. Delivering games to the Steam community is an important step in achieving this goal,” said Mike Blank, SVP, Strategic Growth. “Not only are we excited to have our games on Steam, but we look forward to bringing them even more value when our subscription becomes available in the Summer.”
New EA games developed for PC will also launch on Steam alongside other platforms, including the Command & Conquer™ Remastered Collection which launches tomorrow, providing mod support with the Steam Workshop as this game is one of the first major RTS franchises to open source their source code under the GPL. The compilation, which was made for and with the help of the community, is comprised of Command & Conquer: Tiberian Dawn, Command & Conquer: Red Alert and their three expansion packs – Covert Ops, Counterstrike and The Aftermath.
You may recall that some years ago, EA pulled most of their catalog — not all of it; a handful of EA-published titles remained available — off of Steam, as part of the launch of their own Origin digital storefront. And there is certainly no indication that Origin is going away any time soon. Most of the titles that they’ve re/introduced on Steam to date have been newer titles, but we can certainly hope that they will also bring their catalogue of classic titles in at some point. It would be nice to see the Ultima games come to Steam, for example.
(Hat tip: Infinitron Dragon)
They actually only pulled a few games that were new at the time, due to disagreements with Valve over DLC policy. Dragon Age II was the major one, I think. Everything that was released before that stayed.
Yeah, I didn’t want to get into a big list of titles. But I do note here that they never pulled their entire library off of Steam.
EA can do whatever they want, no way they’re getting my money. No, not even for Ultima rereleases. That money won’t go to the Origin devs who made the games, so I don’t see the point.
I’ll likely buy the Ultima series if it pops up on Steam. I own the games on Origin and GOG already, so why not?
If you want to support developers who worked on previous Ultima games, there’s a long list of projects both long-running and recent I could suggest you look into…