EA partners with Valve to bring its EA Access subscription service to Steam next spring and launch games on Steam starting with Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order
Brendan Sinclair / GamesIndustry.biz :
Context & Ripple Effects
EA spent the mid-2010s building a walled garden: Origin Access launched in 2016 at $4.99 a month, then expanded with the $14.99 Origin Access Premier tier in 2018 — all of it locked to EA's own Origin client, with EA arguing that streaming tech and subscription appetite would let it reach every screen directly. This deal reverses that: EA content returns to Steam, and EA Access rides along.
The significance is that EA is conceding distribution to Valve rather than forcing players onto Origin — while its subscription ambitions continue, later surfacing in the [[a:884013|Amazon Luna partnership that brought EA titles like Star Wars Jedi: Survivor to cloud gaming]]. The store war is giving way to a platform-agnostic subscription strategy.
First-order effects
- Steam's large PC audience regains access to EA's new releases, starting with Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, without installing Origin — a direct reversal of EA's client-exclusivity stance.
- EA Access gains a second storefront home next spring, putting EA's subscription in front of Steam users who had no reason to touch Origin.
Second-order effects
- Valve strengthens Steam's position as the default PC gaming hub by hosting a rival publisher's subscription service — the same flywheel logic EA once tried to replicate with Origin now works for Valve.
- Other publishers running proprietary launchers face pressure to follow EA back to Steam, since exclusivity now costs more audience than it protects.
Third-order effects
- If publishers keep abandoning first-party storefronts, PC distribution consolidates around platforms that aggregate subscriptions — a path EA itself later extended by putting its catalog on Amazon's Luna, which has since been folded into Prime Video.
- The subscription, not the store client, becomes the product: whoever owns the customer relationship (Valve, Amazon) captures the recurring revenue, while publishers trade storefront control for reach.
The trend: Major publishers are shifting from proprietary launchers and store exclusivity toward platform-agnostic distribution, renting reach from aggregators like Valve and Amazon in exchange for subscription scale.