Electronic Arts recently made its return to Steam, but something strange is going on with pricing. EA just increased the price on a lot of Steam games in many regions. EA and Valve announced a partnership near the end of 2019 and many EA games made their return to the games marketplace. Now, EA has been hiking the prices of many of those games.
EA and Valve have had a strange relationship. EA has its own games marketplace and premium games service. But neither of those has been as successful as Electronic Arts had hoped they would be, so a return to Steam makes sense as a way to market EA games to a larger audience. However, it seems that Electronic Arts is demanding a premium from certain users. Though price hikes happen regularly for a variety of reasons, this one doesn’t seem to be the harbinger of a planned sale or another common reason a company might wish to up its prices.
Reddit user MJuniorDC9 noticed that EA is increasing prices for non-U.S. users. These price increases affect Canada, Europe (including the U.K.), Brazil, and Russia. The Mass Effect Collection, for example, was previously 27,99€. The new price is 34,99€. SimCity4: Deluxe Edition was previously 399₽ but it now costs more than double at 999₽. Dragon Age: Origins Ultimate Edition, previously CDN$29.99, now costs CDN$39.99. U.S. prices remain the same. Other affected games include Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3 Uprising, Battlefield: Bad Company, and Crysis. Most EA games on Steam seem to be affected.
There seems to be no set method of determining this pricing. The increases vary wildly and some games cost double what they do on EA’s Origin store. While this was previously the case with some games, the new regional price scheme increases the cost of the games at levels many would consider unreasonable. The price changes, which were unannounced, seem to have occurred between February 5th and 7th.
Despite major price adjustments like this being a big deal, EA has not explained or even publicly acknowledged them. Many of the affected EA games are old enough to have graduated high school, yet gamers might find them to cost double what they previously did. Notably, the price changes do not apply to the Origin store - so EA may be attempting to use Steam to drive business home, so to speak. Whatever the reason for these largely unreasonable price hikes, fans of EA games should look elsewhere before purchasing them on Steam.
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Source: Reddit
