A few weeks ago Crysis 2 was on sale through Steam. I thought to myself, “eh… I’ll catch the next sale.” Looks like I totally played myself out because, as of right now, Crysis 2 is no longer on Steam. No announcements or statements appear to have been made regarding this so far. If you Google search, most of what you will find are forum posts relating to the news… and lots of flaming about it as expected. While I wasn’t expecting this to happen, it’s not really surprising since Electronic Arts announced that the EA store, re-branded as “Origin” last week, is being reformed as a direct competitor with Steam. I was expecting for EA Games to have some type of added perk for purchasing their titles through Origin, but not for games to be completely pulled off of other distribution platforms altogether.
So what’s going to happen now? Will this impact sales of Origin-only games? I’m not going to go into any type of deep analysis here, but personally, I think it will. I don’t think it will hurt enough to shut down Origin, but removing popular games from a platform with such a large user base as Steam can’t have positive effects. I know on my part I really don’t feel like dealing with another distribution platform and, with all of the hacking going on right now, I don’t want to have more locations where my credit card info is being stored. When I do decide to get Crysis 2, it will likely be through another platform that I already have setup such Amazon during a sale. As of right now, EA still has multiple titles available on Steam such as Crysis, Farcry, and Farcry 2 so it doesn’t look like they are pulling out completely. We have contacted both Steam and EA and are awaiting responses. We’ll update should we get a response.
