Yet another PC game from publisher Electronic Arts has been pulled from the popular Steam download service. This time it"s Dragon Age II, the fantasy RPG sequel from developer BioWare. The pull out happened on the same day that EA and BioWare released the first major DLC pack for Dragon Age II, Legacy, leading some to believe that this is yet another conflict between EA and Steam"s owners Valve over how Steam handled downloadable content for games. Officially EA has yet to comment on the situation. However, it appears that people who have previously purchased Dragon Age II on Steam will still be able to access the Legacy DLC pack.
According to Destructoid, the issue may be due to the fact that the Legacy DLC pack is offered inside Dragon Age II itself via an in-game store. That might violate Steam"s terms of service. While it"s possible that BioWare and EA could have made a Steam-specific version of the game that stays within Steam"s rules its likely that neither party wanted to take the time to make that happen. As a result Valve may have just decided to pull the game off Steam completely.
Earlier this year EA pulled Crysis 2 off of Steam. EA"s David DeMartini stated that the reason was that a DLC pack for the first person shooter was made available to Direct2Drive users as a PC exclusive. It"s also looking like the highly anticipated EA first person shooter Battlefield 3 might not be made available to Steam customers as well. Steam is the biggest single source for downloadable PC games with 30 million users. EA recently relaunched its own PC game downloadable store with a new brand, Origin, with plans to offer exclusive content including the only place to download a copy of the upcoming MMO Star Wars The Old Republic.