EA Distributes Valve Titles

[JacK[CB]]

EA ?! This is not good news.

[blueflamedazn]

EA and Lord Voldemort must be conspiring...

[Zips]

Haklin wrote..

thats what westwood and now dice(dev of battlefield series) thought aswel...

Valve is just a wee bit larger and more successful than those companies.

[Haklin]

Before ea screwed westwood up the duff...that company was on par with blizzard. the c&c series had 10 times the pulling power of anything hl related.

[Pharlap]

[CyW]-=BigBear=- wrote..

Westwood ended up dead and the C&C range completly raped!

ahem.......cnc generals is teh shit!

Haklin wrote..

thats what westwood and now dice(dev of battlefield series) thought aswel...

yep. EA wont promote valve at all. they will promote their brand name.

[-:Nighthawk:-]

The pull a publisher usually has on a game developer is there because typically the publisher funds the development of the game. Because they've invested a significant amount of money and basically pay the salaries of the game studio's employees... they can do pretty much anything they want with that leverage.



VALVe thus far has funded its projects through Gabe's personal wealth and now from profit from their products. HL2 is already developed... that means that all EA is agreeing to do is make some boxes, get them to some stores, and promote the heck out of it.



EA thus likely has no real ability to tell VALVe what to do at all in even the slightest of ways. They're just in it because it's a good title to have on your list of published games, and want to make some money from the whole business. VALVe is in it probably both to break free from Vivendi (with whom they've had less than ideal relations thus far) and to get better promotion for HL2.



Any way you look at it, this isn't really a bad thing. I bought my copy of HL2 over Steam, and just like any other future VALVe product, it's completely unaffected by their choice of publisher.



Keep that in mind before you try to bring up completely different situations that other studios were in. The same things happen by the hands of other publishers to other game studios all the time, and their respective fan groups cry about it for a while before moving on. Not really something VALVe has to worry about right now, no matter who they're with.

[Mikemike 2.0]

This is my guess of what Valve is thinking: 'Lets just go with EA becuase for now its better than the situation that we had with Vivendi'.



Although I think this is de ja vu all over again. This combo wont be much better and I think it will leave Valve unhappy again. Valve won once, I have a bad feeling if worst comes to worst again, they may not win becuase EA is a much bigger company than Vivendi and it will probably go in their favor.



I think NCSoft would have been a much better merketing decision (publishers of Guild Wars and City of Heroes, both best sellers and yet NCSoft did only their job of publishing). Well there is nothing we can do now but just sit back and wait for the reprocussions. Its probably too late to change the deal now so we mind as well not bitch and whine.

[csrush]

azz0r wrote..

I know alot of people are going to bitch and worry about this.



Its simply an agreement to publish existing Valve games.



Aslong as EA publish what Valve wants, when Valve wants, I see no problems.

I kind of worrie about this since I am a loyal cs gamer and have been for years. But EA does have a good rep so far.