EA games are returning to Steam along with the EA Access subscription service
0Reported today on The Verge
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Reported today in The Verge.
EA games are returning to Steam along with the EA Access subscription service
EA will start releasing games on Steam again, after it moved away from the popular PC game marketplace in 2011 in favor of its Origin store and launcher. It’ll start with Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, making it the first new EA game released on Steam since 2011.
Additionally, EA announced plans to bring its EA Access subscription service to Steam starting next year, allowing players to pay a monthly price for access to a collection of EA games through Steam.
“At the core, we are game makers, and our aspiration is to connect as many people as we can to the great games that we built and make it as frictionless as possible for them to do that,” explained Mike Blank, senior vice president at EA. “So with more players playing more games and more platforms, frankly, we want to be where the players are.” In EA’s case, that means Steam.
EA plans to follow up Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order’s release on Steam with other recently released games from its catalog, including The Sims 4, Unravel 2, Apex Legends, FIFA 20, and Battlefield V.
Despite the fact that Steam and Origin are PC launchers that run on the same platform, EA is effectively treating the two storefronts as totally separate platforms. For example, if you’ve purchased EA games in the last eight years on Origin, there won’t be any way to transfer those purchases to Steam — even if they’re rereleased there.
EA will, of course, be happy to sell you a second copy on Steam if you’re particular about having all of your games in one place. EA is also working to allow for crossplay between the Origin and Steam versions of its PC games. (That makes sense since they’re the same PC game. They are just sold through different stores.) New EA releases going forward will presumably appear on both storefronts, so players will be able to choose their purchases for the launcher they want.
That split also applies to EA Access on Steam, which is explicitly not the same thing as EA’s Origin Access subscription service that it offers through Origin. As the name suggests, EA Access on Steam will apparently be similar to EA’s console subscription services, as opposed to the larger catalog on Origin Access.
“I would anticipate that the catalog of games you’ll see will be more akin to what you see on EA Access on Xbox or PlayStation,” said Blank. To put that in perspective, EA Access on the Xbox One has just under 80 games, while the PS4 has roughly half of that, compared to the 235 (Origin Access) or 247 (Origin Access Premiere) titles available on PC. Pricing will be the same as EA Access on the Xbox One and PlayStation 4: $4.99 a month or $29.99 annually. Which games will be available on Steam’s EA Access is still being figured out between now and whenever the service launches next year, though.
EA infamously broke up with Valve’s Steam platform with the release of Crysis 2 in 2011. It blamed Steam’s “set of business terms” for developers for preventing the release of that game due to a deal Crysis 2 developer Crytek had with another service.
Blank wouldn’t comment specifically on what had changed since then, beyond saying, “It’s a new way of working with Valve.” The company also wouldn’t comment on whether it had reached some unique terms with Valve over the percentage it takes from Steam sales. (Valve typically takes between 20 and 30 percent of the sale, depending on how much a developer has sold overall on Steam.)
If those standard terms are the case, then EA is putting up some big money on its belief that it wants to meet players where they are, given that it loses money on every sale it makes on Steam compared to selling games on its Origin platform.
With EA’s new philosophy of putting its games where players are, one might wonder if those games could show up on other storefronts like the Epic Game Store. According to Blank, they are “open to new partnerships,” although there’s nothing specific to announce at this time.