EA Talks About 'Point of Disagreement' with Valve's SteamEA ran into a bit of controversy a few weeks ago when Crysis 2 was suddenly pulled from Valve's Steam service. As it turned out, this was not EA's decision, but actually an action taken by Valve because of business terms they insist on. Today, EA's SVP of global online David DeMartini briefly addressed the issue on his blog and he further elaborated on the subject with IndustryGamers.
"It seems to be a little bit of a juxtaposition that we find ourselves in agreement with everybody in the channel – everyone seems to find our policy acceptable with a singular exception."
"Some confusion came up a few weeks ago, when we started seeing stories and forum posts that suggested that EA was in conflict with one of our download partners, and that we had removed our games from that service. This is absolutely not true. I want to make sure our players understand EA's policy on selling games through our download partners... To be very clear, except under extremely special circumstances we offer our games to every major download service including Amazon, GameStop, and others," he said on the blog.
Where EA and Valve appear to be butting heads over Steam is who gets to manage the relationship with the gamer. When it comes to EA properties, EA wants to be in control.
DeMartini continued, "As you know, games and how they are made have both changed. Today, we continue to extend the experience with new maps, vehicles and other content that adds hours of fun and more value for our players. We also enhance the gaming experience with features like friends lists and in-game chat using the Origin application. Most importantly, we always want to be sure we provide this content and service at the highest possible level of quality. To ensure this, any retailer can sell our games, but we take direct responsibility for providing patches, updates, additional content and other services to our players. You are connecting to our servers, and we want to establish on ongoing relationship with you, to continue to give you the best possible gaming experience. This works well for our partnership with GameStop, Amazon and other online retailers."
"Unfortunately, if we're not allowed to manage this experience directly and establish a relationship with you, it disrupts our ability to provide the support you expect and deserve. At present, there is only one download service that will not allow this relationship," he said referring to Steam without directly naming the service. "This is not our choice, and unfortunately it is their customer base that is most impacted by this decision. We are working diligently to find a mutually agreeable solution."
In our phone conversation with DeMartini, he observed how strange it seems that only one service would not see eye-to-eye with EA's insistence on managing the relationship with the consumer. "It absolutely is a point of disagreement. We will make our content available to everyone, but then they need to make the choice as to whether or not they find our strong feeling of responsibility to the customer acceptable to them and their business terms," he told us. "What we're doing is no different than what they have done historically with regards to how they've handled ongoing patches, etc. It seems to be a little bit of a juxtaposition that we find ourselves in agreement with everybody in the channel – everyone seems to find our policy acceptable with a singular exception."
That said, EA doesn't want to lose the gamers on Steam and the publisher is hopeful that it can come to some sort of agreement with Valve.
"I managed the Partners program for the last five years and have a very close relationship with the guys at Valve. We have tremendous respect for them, but much like in a marriage or business relationship, sometimes you both have a very strong opinion about something," DeMartini explained to us. "And you hope there can be room [to reach an agreement] because we find those Steam customers very enthusiastic gamers that we absolutely want to continue to attract to our IP. They're great gamers, we make great games, so it seems like a perfect matchup. We certainly always have the door open and are open to discussion on that topic, but at the end of the day, all we can do is make our content available to everyone and give them the choice to carry that content. Just like with Crysis, it certainly wasn't our choice to not have that game continue to be sold there. It's always the choice of the retailer as to whether or not they will carry a product; I can't control that unfortunately."
DeMartini concluded, "I do think there are some policies and principles that everybody should adhere to that are in the best interest of the consumer and I hope they [Valve] come to that realization as well and that they believe in choice just like we do."
