Since 2011 EA have kept their games Origin exclusive, but no longer
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We heard from EA last year that they would be embarking on a new partnership with Valve, to bring their catalog of games back to Steam. In 2011, EA started making their newly released games exclusive to its own Origin service, beginning with Battlefield 3. Since 2011, games in the Battlefield series, the Need for Speed games, Mirror’s Edge Catalyst, Dragon Age: Inquisition, and many others have been exclusive to Origin on PC.
EA’s Origin is an OK service. It’s adequate. It contains all the basic mandatory functionality one would require from a service for buying and downloading games on PC, but I’d struggle to say anything more enthusiastic in its favor. I’ve never had massive problems with it as I have with some other stores, but it would never be my first choice either.
Interestingly enough, not only are these games available for purchase on Steam right now, but they also all point to “EA Access” on their store page. This is going to be something new for Steam, where you can buy games in the traditional à la carte way, or you can pay a monthly subscription to get access to EA’s entire library of games on Steam.
They’re clearly still uploading games and DLC, and this hasn’t actually been officially announced by EA or Steam yet, so if there’s a particular title you are holding out hope for, perhaps it’s still on the way. I can’t see any of the recent Battlefield games yet, nor any of the Titanfall games or the spin-off Apex Legends. Mass Effect 3 is conspicuously absent, particularly irritating since the first two games in the trilogy have been on Steam for years. None of their sports titles like FIFA or Madden have shown up yet, either. Hopefully, it will be a comprehensive selection of everything EA, rather than just a select few titles.
The EA Access on Steam service has not launched yet, but these games all becoming available today hints that EA might be preparing to launch the service soon, and there’s even promotional artwork on each game’s page mentioning the service as “coming soon”.
You can browse through EA’s entire selection of games on Steam here, including newly added titles, titles that were released on Steam when they first came out, and a bunch of much older back catalog titles too.
The full list of titles newly added in this wave are:
This new wave of titles all require you to have EA’s Origin app installed too, and if you don’t already have it, it will be installed when you are installing these games. It’s not clear if that’s going to be the case for all future EA titles on Steam, or if it’s a hangover from these games all integrating with different aspects of the Origin client that would be tricky to untangle.
There will be more to come from this partnership between EA and Steam, but it’s not exactly clear when the next wave of titles will appear. We’ll keep an eye out.
