Battlefield 3 may make it to Steam after all

[ArithonUK]

MCV are reporting that EA and Valve are trying hard to iron out their differences and get EA games back onto Valve's Steam delivery service.

EA have said

Unfortunately, Steam has adopted a set of restrictive terms of service  which limit how developers interact with customers to sell downloadable  content. No other download service has adopted this practice.  Consequently some of our games have been removed by Steam.

However, other sources indicate that the falling out happened, allegedly because EA plan to limit all DLC sales to their own new digital distribution service, Origin. So other retailers like Steam, Direct2Drive etc. could sell the games, but not the DLC to go with them!

BF3Blog has an interesting article about how the possible absence of BF3 on Steam could damage sales and even more fascinating, are the sales figures for BF:BC2. Out of 9 million units of BF:BC2 sold, 2.5 million are on the PC! That's 27% market share! Bear in mind, that EA only estimate 10% of BF3 sales to be on the PC, so are they selling us short (again)?

[Tutonic]

... or perhaps not: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/08/07/no-battlefield-3-on-steam-ea-explain-a-bit/

[T-Bag]

I've been saying all along that it'll make it eventually, you probably won't see it till right before launch (although maybe a week or two after if they're stubborn)but be patient. Before EA eventually cave they want to negotiate as much as possible out of Valve so they'll be stirring things up in the press for a while yet.

They're arguing over Steam wanting to be able to distribute all DLC available for any game shipped on Steam (So you avoid situation like GTA IV where there was a horrible clash of a Steam game with DLC only available through GFWL).
DLC is the real money maker for e-retailers. People only buy a game once, but if you release 30 good map packs you can extend a game almost indefinitely, making money along the way, potentially more than the initial game...and none of it could even possibly go to Steam if they aren't allowed to offer it in their store.
Valve have a big enough platform that they can demand not to be cut out, the other digital retailers presumably already caved and EA is one stop short of setting up like GFWL being to sole distributor of DLC for their games. And that could mean yet another horrible turn your hard cash into points system for purchasing games etc where you always get money left over you can't spend on anything you want without topping up more and being left with more you can't spend.

Valve want to be a shop that sell and supply everything you need for a game from reviews, trailers, screenshots, patches, support, DLC, strategy guides, and even graphics drivers. Any company who tries to limit this risks missing out on a lot of customers (remember every single PC MW2 and BO player is a steam user, and that is their target audience) they want to beat CoD and they might struggle if they limit the potential market.