Over the weekend EA published a list of digital outlets for Battlefield 3 on Battlefield.com . It was swiftly pulled, but not before RPS and Joystiq noticed that while GamersGate, Direct2Drive, EA's own Origin and a number of other services were on the list, Steam was not.
Steam's exclusion from the list could have been a mistake, and Battlefield 3 could be announced for Steam seperately before its release on October 25, but the absence of Valve's service is conspicuous given the recent launch of EA's Origin digital download service, and the fact that EA's Crysis 2 was pulled from Steam earlier this year.
EA have since said that it was not their decision to take remove Crysis 2. They recently explained that Crysis 2 was removed because Steam's terms of service conflicted with the exclusive release of DLC on Direct2Drive. Could a similar situation stop Battlefield 3 from appearing on Steam? Would the lack of a Steam version put you off buying the game?
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Part of the UK team, Tom was with PC Gamer at the very beginning of the website's launch—first as a news writer, and then as online editor until his departure in 2020. His specialties are strategy games, action RPGs, hack ‘n slash games, digital card games… basically anything that he can fit on a hard drive. His final boss form is Deckard Cain.
