HMM. This demonstrates incredible confidence in EA’s own brands, but the key back foot they’re on is that they don’t have any other publishers they can bring on board. What would change everything in the war against Steam is if the other major publishers launched their own Origin-like services and restricted their download sales to those. I won’t be at all surprised if that happens, as a few are quietly building the infrastructure – THQ have a store, Ubisoft have that uPlay thing, Blizzard obviously sell their own digital stuff direct… You could even see Call of Duty: Elite as heading vaguely in that direction.

While I’m quite sure most publishers are pretty happy about Steam sales figures, they’re surely not overjoyed about giving a large piece of the revenue pie to Valve. Or, indeed, to retailers. EA staging this little rebellion alone looks kinda crazy – but what happens if all the big boys do similar?

As for why Crysis 2 is no longer on Steam, an EA spokesperson explained to me that Crytek had brokered a deal for another digital distributor to host the game's downloadable content. Because Steam could not distribute the content, Steam took the game down. It's still not available.