EA: Valve Responsible For Dragon Age II's Steam Removal

Electronic Arts says Valve's "restrictive terms of service" are to blame for Dragon Age II's removal from the Steam download service this week, rather than competition from EA's own Origin service. The title was removed from Steam just as EA began offering the game's Legacy DLC through an in-game store, a practice banned by Steam's terms of service. The publisher's Crysis 2 was removed from Steam last month under similar circumstances. "At EA, we offer our games and content to all major download services including GameStop, Amazon, Direct2Drive and Steam," EA's senior vice president of global e-commerce David DeMartini said in a statement. "Unfortunately, Steam has adopted a set of restrictive terms of service which limit how developers interact with customers to sell downloadable content," he continued. "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." When EA launched its Origin digital distribution service last month, DeMartini told Gamasutra that the service was not meant to be the exclusive distribution method for EA titles. "It's not like you can't continue to buy products from retail or other digital distributors," he told us. "We're providing people with choice, and trying to entice them towards it based on the fact it doesn't cost anything."