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Valve vs. Electronic Arts

The relationship between Valve and Electronic Arts gets a little bit rockier as of late.

Dragon Age II has been removed from Valve’s digital distribution client Steam just Dragon Age II: Legacy, the game’s first run of downloadable content, launched.

This isn’t the first time that Valve and Electronic Arts have had a scuffle, and this time EA was quick to comment,

"At EA, we offer our games and content to all major download services including GameStop, Amazon, Direct2Drive and Steam," said EA senior VP of global e-commerce David DeMartini in an emailed statement. "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."

Unfortunately, no agreement has been met and Dragon Age II remains off of Steam.

A few weeks ago Valve and EA had similar complications, when Crysis 2 was pulled from Steam, foreshadowing growing friction between the two companies.

"It’s unfortunate that Steam has removed Crysis 2 from their service. This was not an EA decision or the result of any action by EA," said EA at the time. "Steam has imposed a set of business terms for developers hoping to sell content on that service--many of which are not imposed by other online game services. Unfortunately, Crytek has an agreement with another download service which violates the new rules from Steam and resulted in its expulsion of Crysis 2 from Steam."   

From the looks of it, it appears that Valve is the one being difficult here. Unfortunately, no amount of marriage counseling or roses is going to help when there are dollar signs involved.

Crysis 2 still hasn’t been returned to Steam since being pulled so I wouldn’t expect Dragon Age II to be coming back any time soon.