Electronic Arts tells Steam that Battlefield 3 is not theirs.

Joystiq has revealed that Steam and Electronic Arts are having a fight over distribution. EA says games are not being delivered according to contract.

Steam says Electronic Arts isn’t allowing them to have promised games. So now EA has taken its ball and gone home by not allowing BF3 to be distributed. To be fair this move isn’t unexpected at all, because EA obviously would prefer to have its origins service as #1 distributor.

But why is EA doing this? Recent news has come to light that Electronic Arts is upset with how Steam handles their games. Steam places a lot of guidelines and restrictions on Electronic Arts to keep them from abusing their fan base any more than they do. Being a giant, evil corporation EA does not like this one bit. Their claim of abuse is rather shallow when EA adds double DRM to Steam games like Spore.

So what exactly is Steam going to do over this? Basically tell them to kiss off, as EA will not make or break Valve over its games. While the loss of Electronic Arts games would be a big loss of revenue, they wouldn’t die over it. In fact they probably wouldn’t even lose any sleep over it even if it will be a significant financial blow.

That being said, this is indicative of a much larger war over Digital Distribution. We would go so far as to call it Digital Distribution wars. Everyone from EA to Gamestop has their own platform now, with tens of smaller platforms. And to be fair, it’s worked very well for Gamestop. When they released their platform, their stock price increased for the first time in quite a while and many people ended up looking up how to buy gamestop stock because they’d not done it in so long!

This number could accelerate into the hundreds of platforms over time. This is because many of the platforms have little regard for the quality of their games, such as Gamestop’s Impulse service. We can only hope that this trend does not continue or the computer gaming market will be flooded with even more shovelware.