EA hasn’t released any games on Steam since 2011. The company abandoned Valve’s service in favor of using its own Origin service. However, it seems that this may be changing soon, as a number of clues seem to indicate that EA Steam releases may once again become a thing.
Folks on Reddit first took notice when Valve gave a first look at the new Steam UI. The preview in question contained an image of EA’s first-person cyberpunk parkour game Mirror’s Edge Catalyst. Following that, people found more clues on data mining site SteamDB hinting that EA may be bringing some of its games back to Steam.
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The first of these clues was the discovery by Twitter user RobotBrush of an app that seems to be testing Origin integration in Steam. Other companies already do a similar kind of integration with their own launchers, most notably Ubisoft’s Uplay.
Following this, a couple of clues related to actual games were spotted. SteamDB reported that Dragon Age 2‘s Steam entry seems to have received a new package in the past week. This is interesting in that Dragon Age 2 was the game that led to EA leaving Steam in the first place. Back in 2011, EA and Valve had a dispute over the latter’s DLC policies on Steam. EA wanted to be able to sell DLC within the game itself, but Valve didn’t allow that back then. Valve has since changed Steam’s policies to allow DLC to be sold within the game.
The more interesting clue, however, is the discovery of a listing for 2009’s The Saboteur. The open-world World War 2 game by the now-defunct Pandemic Studios was never actually released on Steam. As such, it’s curious that a Steam entry for the game seems to have existed since at least 2018. Additionally, SteamDB reports that someone has actually played this unreleased game on Steam within the past few days. Is someone at EA play testing the game before its Steam release is announced?
If the speculation is correct, and EA is going to release games on Steam, it’ll be a big boost for the service. Steam is facing increasing competition from the Epic Games Store which has aggressively been pursuing exclusives as of late. While Steam still has a significant lead over its rival, getting a few more games on it that aren’t on Epic certainly couldn’t hurt.
