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EA To Publish for Valve
Primotech writes "It appears that Valve has secured EA as its new publisher. When the developer settled its lawsuit with Vivendi back in April, the company was left without a publisher to distribute boxed copies of its games. The company has tapped EA, which will publish and release Half-Life 2: Game of the Year Edition and Half-Life 2 for the Xbox sometime this year. From the article: 'EA is the worldwide leader in bringing best of breed games, for all platforms, to market...By combining EA's unparalleled operation structure and distribution channel with Valve's award-winning development teams and games community, we've established an awesome combination for delivering great products to console and PC gamers around the world.'"
Ahhh, EA...how that company releases so many top-notch games but manages to make them all somehow less than they should be blows my mind.
I loved Need for Speed Underground on my Gamecube...except when it locked up.
I loved Battlefield 1942...except for the problems too numerous to list here which mostly got fixed eventually.
I'm currently loving TimeSplitters: Future Perfect on my Gamecube except for its lockups.
Who the hell besides EA releases a console game that isn't totall stable?!?!
Thats a complete lie. Ive got daemon tools/alcohol 120% and a few others installed and I did NOT have to untinstall them to get bf2 to install.
The error message the game gives you doesn't tell you the name of the offending program. It says something like '...uninstall all CD emulation software...'. Some tools package both emulation and ripping into the same tool set. So the already pissed customer has to keep uninstalling software one program at a time until it magically starts working.
Something like that should be grounds for a class action suit. I know people love to say 'read the EULA', but how long until the average EULA takes 20 days just to read and understand? It's more akin to entrapment than an agreement.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
I think that the fact that EA is the publisher is mostly irrelevant. Valve is (was) in a very unique position; they are an independant developer with a huge franchise looking for a publisher. Any publisher would kill to publish the game, under extremely tight restrictions. If a publisher doesn't like the restrictions, Valve can say, fine, publishers are knocking down the door to get this deal.
I suspect that the contract that Valve has with EA gives EA absolutely no control over the games themselves. EA normally only has control of games because they either made a game themselves, own the company that made the game, or put forth cash to make the game. Valve has plenty of cash, so they don't have any reason to give EA any control over their games at all.
I am guessing that the deal that Valve has with EA is pretty much "We supply the games, you publish them, end of story." I don't think we'll see EA delaying future releases via Steam because they're not on shelves yet; Valve didn't like it when Vivendi did that.
In short, I think that EA is simply a vehicle to get products on shelves and will have no control over anything. For those of us who hate EA and would rather our money didn't go to them, this is exactly what Valve's excellent STEAM platform is designed to do.
I purchased HL2 via STEAM. Vivendi didn't get a penny, though Vivendi did set a minimum price that Valve could charge. And now that EA is Valve's new publisher, EA won't get any of my cash; it's going all to Valve.
Gamers need to be on the watch out for EA and other publishers who could try to form some kind of GPAA--we're already hearing the same story of "I want to support the artists (read developers), but I know the money just goes to the labels/whatever (read publishers)." Now they're trying to control how their product is distributed at the device level (barring CD emulators).
Valve pretty soon realised that they had to abandon the DRM/CD copy protection stuff, and they did. Steam works smoothly: updates are automatically downlaoded (no searching on some filemirrors anymore where you have to create an account etc), the game can be played from different computers without having to enter a 20-digit serial no etc. "Pure garbag", "intentionally crippled": it may have not perfect from the start, but for me it is.
What I wouldn't give to see the contents of this contract. Since Valve really wanted to be able to distrubte electronically and bypass a publisher, I would imagine that's in their somewhere. Still, I think any publisher could make a lot of money still of HL2. Lets face it, there's still mods coming (DoD) and with an XBox version on its way, store shelves will be packed again with HL2 boxes.
As far as Steam online distribution, I'm sure that matter is very detailed in the contract by Valve. Valve just finished several years of lawsuits vs Sierra/Vivendi and one of the main disputed issues was Valve wanting to distribute games directly to people on-line.
After going through years of that, I'm sure that Valve is very paranoid about getting back into the jam they just got out of.
IMO, EA will cash in on the console distribution mostly. After all, the PC distribution may be a loss in the long run. Once an EA/Steam game is installed, Valve will be able to sell more games directly to those PC players and that's a loss of future EA sales.
Valve wins: They get an Evil & powerful distributor to sell more copies of the game than Valve would otherwise. Using Steam, they will also get to directly advertise to those people.
EA wins: Bragging rights about having (implied created by EA as always) the most popular on-line FPS games in the world. And, they'll hope that the console sales make up for future losses by Steam distributed games to the PC gamers.
This is not a dream, not a dream...we are transmitting from the year 1-9-9-9.