No Steam Version For Battlefield 3

[SubZero.it]

Seems a bit of official...and also a bad news

Rumors say EA to push Origin service instead
Rumors are coming from a number of sources to us that apparently Steam will not be offering Battlefield 3. We find this quite hard to believe, as Steam has over 30 million unique users, and why would Electronic Arts and DICE want to risk losing sales by not offering the title on Steam? Whispers suggest that it is a rub between Steam and EA.

Our sources think that it actually might be a major play for EA to push its own digital download service which was recently introduced. Known as Origins, this new service does not apparently want to compete with Steam, but instead establish a new full service hub to support EA titles and EA players. Some smaller digital distribution players are expected to be offering Battlefield 3 as well as including Direc2Drive and GamersGate, if rumors are accurate.

It is hard to say if this is actually going to come to pass or if it is nothing more than a hard ball type tactic that EA is using to deal with Steam. Before it is all said and done, we think Steam will offer Battlefield 3 in the end, but not before some additional posturing takes place on both sides. There is a lot of money to be made and it is hard to think that EA would want to take a chance on losing sales because they are not offering Battlefield 3 on Steam.

Source

[HuffPCair]

It would be smarter to offer it cheaper on Origin instead.

[Frananta]

EA

[naokaji]

Dumb move from EA, many stores have massively reduced the number of pc games they sell in physical form and focus on consoles instead, so digital distribution is the only way to sell a PC Game in decent numbers these days, which means not offering it on Steam is pretty much suicide.

[SubZero.it]

It would be smarter to offer it cheaper on Origin instead.

What? :O

[kuroikenshi]

sounds like they want to go against the market trend,
I would be one to favour this if EA had a strong alternative... maybe they're levering on the assumption that PC users will buy it from whoever is selling it... and we are not sure if this game is not another Console port.

Originally Posted by HuffPCair
It would be smarter to offer it cheaper on Origin instead.

I am not sure, maybe so, but plenty of steam users will not go out of their way to sign in to another platform to get the game, I would just go to a discount shop and buy the hard copy instead.

[Hornet331]

Never going to buy anything over origin.. there prices are a joke... they charge more on origin then on first day retail.. hell they chrage more then on steam... before they pulled crysis 2 on steam it was 5€ cheaper then on origine...

[HuffPCair]

Thats what I am saying. EA put it on Steam at the normal price and for the people wanting to save a few bucks it may get them to go to Origin for the game. I think this whole move is totally dumb, but I would see this way making more profit for EA and or getting people to go to Origin.

I will most likely be buying a hard copy so it doesn't really bother me.

[Evantaur]

hmm... if it's not in steam, i will not be buying it :S

[zalbard]

Steam is terrible for patching, anyway. Witcher 2, anyone?

[Hornet331]

Steam is terrible for patching, anyway. Witcher 2, anyone?

Blame CD Projekt not steam... when they are not able to integrate normal patching... like every indy dev is capable of...

I have over 200 games on steam, no other game shows that behaviour. Once there was a bug in a TF2 patch where it dl the whole file again, but they fixed that pretty quick. And its not like DP didn't knew how the steam patching system works... they just didn't cared and put everythinginto a single unalterable archive...

[N19h7m4r3]

Guess I'm not buying it so.

[RCG_Bex]

I love steam... and yes it's a bit slow at patching but I'd rather have all my games in 1 place available to download at any time than have a million games boxes taking up space and that just causes me grief when I'm moving (I was moving every 3-6months before - hoping I'm settled down now but we'll see)

So many places no longer stock PC games around here - and when they do - they have around 5 shelves 1m wide, 2 of which are junk 2nd hand games, 1 of old games and 2 of new games which are spaced out flat against the shelf with empty boxes inbetween and had an extra £5-20 stuck on the price tag!

[zalbard]

Blame CD Projekt not steam... when they are not able to integrate normal patching... like every indy dev is capable of...

CD Project's patches were tiny, actually... I really believe it's more of a Steam's fault in this case. Lack of communication with the devs to start with.

[Andrea deluxe]

bad news...

[Hornet331]

CD Project's patches were tiny, actually... I really believe it's more of a Steam's fault in this case. Lack of communication with the devs to start with.

No its only CDPs fault, they knew Steam didn't support binary patching, they knew steam couldn't alter any archives other then gcfs. Yet they didn't gave a crap about it, hell they even don't thought about adding additional archives for patches (like many other games do it crysis e.g.) and only did the only thing to piss off consumers, release the whole patched game in a single file...

You could blame steam if they suddenly would remove certain patching capabilities, but they didn't.

[phantomferrari]

i dont know why EA would attempt to limit its sales by cutting off the most popular digital distribution service around. i understand they want to push origin but by limiting its sales to a highly anticipated AAA games is not the greatest idea. hmm i am like many others and use steam for all my games. i however have been looking forward to this game for years so while im buying it it will be through amazon and not origin. in the end i think battlefield will be offered on steam simply because there is too much money to be had. even fudzilla thinks so

[paulbagz]

And MW3 will be on steam and will make 40 bazzillion sales @ $90 a pop.

Viva ve, BF3 will fail if its on Origin exclusively.

-PB

[naokaji]

I would be one to favour this if EA had a strong alternative...

Agree, it would be good to have a strong competitor to Steam, but looking at EAs track record I doubt they are the right Company for that.

[Hornet331]

i dont know why EA would attempt to limit its sales by cutting off the most popular digital distribution service around. i understand they want to push origin but by limiting its sales to a highly anticipated AAA games is not the greatest idea. hmm i am like many others and use steam for all my games. i however have been looking forward to this game for years so while im buying it it will be through amazon and not origin. in the end i think battlefield will be offered on steam simply because there is too much money to be had. even fudzilla thinks so

Well I doubt they won't release it on steam, but not before it has launched... like with the Alice game. It got released on steam a few days after everywhere else. So basically they cut it off from all the preorder deals. I guess same will happen with BF3.

[Chrono Detector]

Don't really care to be honest, but it would be wise that EA did put it on Steam to increase sales, unless if they had a fallout with Valve which is kinda interesting why Crysis 2 was pulled from Steam.

[Jamesrt2004]

love steam to stop offereing EA titles. lol would be hilarious

[JayCop]

I was looking forward to this game. Now I think I may boycott it because of EA. I don't trust EA as far as I could throw 'em.

[Dami3n]

No Steam version, no BF3 for me. Simply as that.

[SKYMTL]

Who said it was exclusively on Origin? Man, talk about jumping when there's nothing to worry about....

To be honest, it wouldn't bother me one bit if this wasn't available on Steam. Direct2Drive and Origin have both confirmed availability come launch and D2D even has it up for pre-order with a significant amount of savings.

Steam is a great service but I have found it seriously lacking when it comes to patch rollouts. Metro 2033, Aliens Versus Predator, The Witcher II, Dragon Age II, Dawn of War II and Shogun 2: Total War are just a few games which have had their patches delayed for weeks (or longer) on Steam and DO NOT have the option of installing the stand-alone patch. And that's not even counting the issues arising from the idiotic roadblocks that are put into place when trying to update a Steam game through GFWL (Dirt 2, Dirt 3 and F1 2010 are just some examples).

In my opinion, Origin and Direct2Drive are just as appealing for digital downloads as Steam is so I really don't know where the fanboy-like hate is coming from.