like shuri said, competition is good. I don't see why people are making a huge deal.
Competition is when they sell the game on all services and the services compete through pricing and features.
This is like saying AT&T when they had the iphone exclusively were not being competitive by keeping the iphone within their line of phones only and no one else's.
It's a marketing strategy. And a very effective one at that.
this isn't like the AT&T thing;that was AT&T trying to get people on their service through the exclusive hardware. BF3 isn't Origin exclusive and EA is the publisher. They make money if it's sold on any of these services and Steam is just another storefront. It's a detrimental business strategy because it takes away the biggest digital store to sell their product. That is unless every other one of those digital stores is paying EA to 'snub' Steam. Ideally, they'd want people to buy it from Origin as that would help them the most, but every other store except Steam will carry it. It's not making their own service more attractive to consumers.
which is why it's not so simple to say EA is at fault here, even though EA is usually an ass and Valve kicks ass. there could be conflicting policies that prevent Steam from accepting EA products or EA from selling products on steam. otherwise, it's EA (and possibly other digital retailers) 'attacking' valve. I don't get it. iirc, EA still distributes Valve's games at retail (kinda important for the PS3/360 versions).
having said that, BF3 has been preordered for months now. I'll get the retail version and register it to Origin.
speaking of Red Orchestra 2, both games also have a suppression mechanic. in BF3, if you're under fire, you're not going to be firing back as accurately as you would normally. the balance and usefulness of each class sound great.
