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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.'"
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.