this post was submitted on 23 May 2024
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You missed one, the last game EA published is Tales of Kenzera: Zau, a single player metroidvania. Also no MTX. So that's what? Three for three?
You can't go too wide here, though, because EA makes so many more games than Valve, so let me reframe it.
EA has released way more games with no games-as-service stuff in them than Valve in the past decade.
ROUND 2...
To be fair, EA has released way more games, period. This is across every category. Valve is primarily a digital marketplace company that sometimes makes a game, and has been for a long time.
Also, I didn't include EA as publisher, because it would drastically change the conversation. It's not part of Valve's overall business strategy (again, because they're primarily a marketplace company now) so it's not apples to apples. They simply don't publish externally developed games, because why would they when they run Steam?
EA has a PC storefront as well, though, so technically that is not a difference between the two, but I'm not gonna be disingenuous and pretend the two storefronts are comparable or as much of a priority. And published releases absolutely count, otherwise you'd have to tally each individual EA studio. Valve has published third party games, too. And, in fairness, EA has published Valve games in the past as well.
Either way, by any reasonable metric you choose Valve is at best as deeply invested in MTX and games as a service as EA. Unless you count "how many total games with MTX each has published", because when you make no games you make no MTX, I suppose.
Completely agree with this. I honestly believe the best apples-to-apples metric is to look at their most popular games and compare the mtx across them, in which case Valve doesn't exactly come across as good in the comparison.
In terms of publishing, with the exception of Aperture Hand Lab (basically a little tech demo), they haven't published any third party developer's game since 2010. For the purposes of this conversation, I think it's fair to count EA subsidiaries as EA.
Absolutely, this was the counterpoint I was trying to make about the raw "number of games" argument.
EDIT: Oh, I see the misunderstanding! I mean "published" as "financially backed the development, advertising and releasing of the game", not "published to their storefront". Same word with multiple meanings can be a major source of misunderstandings.
Oh, no, I meant it the same way you do. In either case it's nitpicking and we're agreeing too much to bother with that, honestly.
Stop, he's already dead.