If you're looking in your Steam account for a Mass Effect 3 preorder, I'm afraid you won't find it.  That's because EA announced today that their digital PC sales Bioware's next sci-fi RPG epic will be sold exclusively through their travesty of a game sales site Origin.com.  EA claims that the reason they have pulled the game from Steam's lineup has less to do with wanting to back their service and more with " a set of restrictive terms of service which limit how developers interact with customers to deliver patches and other downloadable content" on Valve's side. Saying that they are happy to do business with any distribution service that let's them deal directly with the consumers is code for "we want to use our own site."

Some have made the very valid point that EA itself limits how much DLC they provide to their customers, since Bioware only sells Dragon Age and Mass Effect DLC.  Patches and DLC for Bioware games up until this point have been incredibly difficult to get if you didn't purchase your games through Steam, so it seems a bit hypocritical to me.  And here I thought EA wasn't going to interfere in business practices for their RPG cash cow.  Silly me.

[via gamesindustry.biz]