When EA started pulling titles from Steam in favor of Origin, I don’t think anyone really expected for their future triple-a titles to come to Steam. As expected by many in the PC community, Bioware has officially announced that Mass Effect 3 will not be available on Steam at launch. The standard company line from EA regarding Steam is that it has a “restrictive terms of service” regarding how patches and DLC are deployed. Seeing that Steams patch/DLC deployment system seems to be working just fine for everyone except EA, one can only imagine that this has something to do directly with Origin.
Battlefield 3 required Origin, and no matter where you bought it, it would always require you to launch Origin to open Battlefield; even if your choice of digital retailer already had a launcher. This hasn’t been confirmed of course, but I am pretty sure one of the “restrictive policies” that’s keeping EA games out of Steam is that Valve isn’t allowing EA to launch Origin through Steam. Pure speculation, but what has really changed over at EA besides requiring Origin for their games? At any rate, if EA wants to continue limiting their reach on the PC, so be it. I for one will not be picking up Mass Effect 3 if it requires Origin. I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one:
[Source: Bioware Forums]
