There was a small bump in gaming news about how Battlefield 3 would not be made available through Steam. Of course, disgruntled gamers from all over the world cried foul on EA. It seemed like a simple bait to get people to choose EA’s Origin service which is a lot similar to Steam, sans the community. It made perfect sense as a typical corporate move to get people to use Origin and up their market share. Battlefield 3 seemed like the perfect bait for gamers.
Hours later, EA sends out a reply to the Battlefield 3 fan base telling them that they would have gladly put the game on Steam if not for Valve’s stringent requirements for using their proprietary service to deliver patches. In other words, EA could not deliver future patches and add ons if they went with Valve. To prove their point, Battlefield 3 is being made available on other digital download services.
Although Steam allows patching, Battlefield 3 aims to deliver patches from within the game itself and this presents the biggest hurdle for getting B3 into Steam. Gamers have taken both sides but as the forums and comment thread shows, more trust seems to be given to Steam as they’ve been more proactive in giving the gaming community great online deals. Some may go as far as saying that Steam IS PC gaming.
In fact, they know gaming so well that they’ve recently launched a beta service allowing all their users to trade in-game items. Huge FAQ here. As of now, included in the set are crafting items, raw materials and weapons for Team Fortress 2 and even trade games that you’ve purchased but have not yet added to your store. The best part? No region restrictions. That means you can trade games with friends who don’t have direct region access to certain titles.
What Steam is doing: making gaming more interesting by allowing you to trade items you’ve earned. They’re approaching other developers to include this feature in their games using Steam’s technology. From the looks of it, it seems that Steam has more to offer gamers than what the faulty Origin service has. It would seem like it should be EA that adapts to Valve’s “restrictions.”
