[Havoc]

Unless EA decides in a few years from now to completely drop their gaming branch and move on to ****ing up some other multi media branch (such as movies for instance), it's not a matter of IF... it's a matter of when.
When will EA grow so big that it controls every game, every developer and all prices?

Recently Valve and EA announced that future Half Life games (including the Xbox version of Half Life 2) will be distibuted by EA unless it's no longer needed. Valve is working hard on upgrading their Steam software to support buying games online, and installing them online. Half Life 2 already had this concept build in partialy, since you had to get some files of the internet before being able to play the game (yes, Half Life 2 is not playable for people without an internet conn). And if Valve has anything to do with it, that's the future of selling games. No more spending 50% of the profits on the selling stores and publishers... if they start selling their games online trough their Steam software, they can easily catch 90% of the profit. Which is a major change from how things go these days. As a game developer, in the end you can be happy if you get as much as 10% of the profit, so just imagine what could happen if big time publishers like EA are out of the picture?

So far, Valve games have reached a high point of 20 million sold copies, now, if they would sell the same ammount with their Steam software; they would be richer then Bill Gates in no time.
But untill then, they are stuck with EA as a publisher. For now the deal is that EA will ONLY distribute the game, and not have a hand in the game AT ALL. This ofcourse is good news... heck its great news. But I remember them saying the same thing to Westwood Studio's 10 years ago... and now Westwood is gone, along with all their future games. So it's a matter of how much we can trust EA.
No doubt it will start with distributing... then a little hand in the game here and there... and before you know it they buy 51% of the stocks Valve has and BAM, another great game developer down the drain.

My advice to Valve: Get your asses working on that Steam project. Even though most of kinda hate it at the moment... it's still better then EA ****ing you over. And if you can pull off selling games online... it's bye bye to EA... and hello revolution in the gaming industry.