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[Jul 18, 2011, 09:24 am ET] - Share - Viewing Comments

A note on Develop has further indications that Battlefield 3 will not be released through Steam, as speculation mounts that DICE's military shooter sequel will not appear on Valve's download service. They quote a comment from a report from financial research firm Baird based on a meeting with GameStop: "The upcoming EA title Battlefield 3 will be sold as a download through GameStop, but not through Steam," Baird says GameStop executives told them. "Given Steam's dominance – and insistence on users downloading a Steam client application – publishers are likely to be receptive to a competitive alternative." Thanks Computer and Video Games.

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261.

Re: More on BF3 and Steam

Jul 20, 2011, 13:04

StingingVelvet

Verno wrote on Jul 20, 2011, 12:58: Slashman (I think) actually made a very compelling argument for that a few pages ago. You'd be hard pressed to sell me on the revenue difference being made up by DLC sales and Origin sellthru, even assuming that somehow turns into a majority. We're talking about a service with 20+ million accounts and the Battlefield series doesn't have Call of Duty cachet yet so all of those casual sales and people who only buy stuff on Steam sales adds up very quickly. Millions of accounts, yes, but how many of those are people who play modern "AAA" games and who won't want to look elsewhere for new releases? That's the question. My girlfriend is two of those accounts and all she owns are Popcap games. I suspect this is EA giving it a shot as an experiment, I highly doubt they have an accurate idea how well it's going to do. They don't have a long history of selling PC DLC and it's a platform that differs a lot from consoles. I would agree in that if they notice significantly lower sales they will reverse course rather quickly. I don't think they would release BF3 or ME3 on PC as experiments though. They are expecting high sales on the PC for BF3 at least, based on Bad Company 2 sales. I wonder how big a percentage of BC2 sales came from Steam.

Subject

Comment [quote="StingingVelvet"Jul 20, 2011, 13:04][quote="Verno"Jul 20, 2011, 12:58]Slashman (I think) actually made a very compelling argument for that a few pages ago. You'd be hard pressed to sell me on the revenue difference being made up by DLC sales and Origin sellthru, even assuming that somehow turns into a majority. We're talking about a service with 20+ million accounts and the Battlefield series doesn't have Call of Duty cachet yet so all of those casual sales and people who only buy stuff on Steam sales adds up very quickly.[/quote] Millions of accounts, yes, but how many of those are people who play modern "AAA" games and who won't want to look elsewhere for new releases? That's the question. My girlfriend is two of those accounts and all she owns are Popcap games. [quote]I suspect this is EA giving it a shot as an experiment, I highly doubt they have an accurate idea how well it's going to do. They don't have a long history of selling PC DLC and it's a platform that differs a lot from consoles. [/quote] I would agree in that if they notice significantly lower sales they will reverse course rather quickly. I don't think they would release BF3 or ME3 on PC as experiments though. They are expecting high sales on the PC for BF3 at least, based on Bad Company 2 sales. I wonder how big a percentage of BC2 sales came from Steam. [/quote]

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