There was a list that EA posted about which digital retailers would be selling Battlefield 3; unfortunately the list was taken down, but Joystiq was able to get a glimpse of it and Steam is nowhere on that list. Steam not being on the list most likely is due to the little scuffle EA and Valve got into.
The story is that Crysis 2 was taken down from Steam because,
"It's unfortunate that Steam has removed Crysis 2 from their service. This was not an EA decision or the result of any action by EA.
Steam has imposed a set of business terms for developers hoping to sell content on that service – many of which are not imposed by other online game services. Unfortunately, Crytek has an agreement with another download service which violates the new rules from Steam and resulted in its expulsion of Crysis 2 from Steam.
Crysis 2 continues to be available on several other download services including Origin.com."
Steam has imposed a set of business terms for developers hoping to sell content on that service – many of which are not imposed by other online game services. Unfortunately, Crytek has an agreement with another download service which violates the new rules from Steam and resulted in its expulsion of Crysis 2 from Steam.
Crysis 2 continues to be available on several other download services including Origin.com."
The reason that Steam is striving so hard, is because it offers patches and DLC for their digital copies. EA and Valve have been in cahoots for quite some time, so I'm not quit sure why EA would be doing something like this, unless its just a move to make users switch over to Origin, not too sure though. But either way, it's a puzzling move that lots of other gamers don't understand. No one has heard Valve's side of the story yet, so the story behind this might be completely different.
