Confirmed: Battlefield will NOT be on Steam

After months of wondering whether the whole debacle between Valve and EA would mean no Battlefield 3 on Steam, we’ve finally got it confirmed: EA has announced that BF3 will not be on Steam, and they’ve given their reason in a forum post to fans:

“Gamers can pre-order Battlefield 3 at Origin.com as well as over 100 digital retailers worldwide. EA offers games to all major download services. Unfortunately, Steam has adopted a set of restrictive terms of service which limit how developers interact with customers to deliver patches and other downloadable content. No other download service has adopted these practices.”

Steam’s terms of service were the reason why Crysis 2 was removed from the digital retailer earlier this year (later, more games were removed). Many speculated, including us, that it was simply EA trying to promote Origin, but this proved to be false, after Battlefield 3 was revealed to be available on many digital retailers across the globe.
Many gamers were waiting to pre-order Battlefield 3 until it was available on Steam, but this looks to have been a waste of time. Despite the bleak news, EA says that they are hoping to work out an agreement with Steam.

Last week, game analyst predicted that the lack of Battlefield 3 on Steam would cost EA 100,000 BF3 copies less sold.

This blog post is written by David Nielsen, I take absolutely no credit for this.