Steam Goes Borg, Assimilates EA Games On To Its Service

By Joe Haygood | December 19, 2008

EA has received a lot of flack over its embracing of DRM and digital downloads.  On the DRM side, they have consistently added overbearing DRM on titles like Steam and Red Alert 3, to the point that you would have to call EA after three installs to get more chances to install a game you had paid for.  Their Digital Download store was just as bad offering you six months to download the game you had just purchased, and for $6 more, you could make sure you could download it for another two years.  Anything beyond that, you had to buy the game, again!

Well, EA is starting to realize that this might not be the best model for them, and have released a slew of games on to the Steam store, including titles like Mass Effect, Need for Speed Undercover, FIFA Manager 2009 and the infamous DRM laden Spore.  Also, Steam lists Dead Space, Red Alert 3 and Mirror’s Edge as coming soon to the service.  Better still is that these games will ship on Steam with no third party DRM, ie. SecuROM or other intrusive DRM device.

via Blue’s News

This brings about the question as to what happenes to EA’s download service.  Do they continue operating a service that no one was ever happy with, or do they just drop the service and go the Steam only route?  If they do shut down, what happens to those that paid for download insurance?  No one knows exactly as of yet, but I would recommend that most people avoid buying stuff on the EA store for the time being.  Just a friendly warning, that’s all.