Following recent teases, EA recently announced that they would be bringing their games back to Steam, while also bringing their subscription service EA Access to Valve’s storefront (though the premier version of the service, Origin Access Premier, remains exclusive to Origin).
Beginning with Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, and also including several older releases like Apex Legends, FIFA 20, Battlefield 5, and The Sims 4, EA games will be available via Steam as well, also allowing cross-play in multiplayer across Steam and Origin. But does this mean that this sort of integration might be coming to other digital storefront as well? Say, the Epic Games Store?
It’s definitely a possibility. Speaking to GamesIndustry, EA senior VP Mike Blank said that though EA doesn’t have any announcements to make about that right now, they’re still “open to new partnerships”, hinting that it’s something that might happen in the future.
“What I’ll say today is we are open to new partnerships,” said Blank. “While I don’t have anything to announce today, we are always open to new partnerships that make sense for our players. So we’ll see what the future holds.”
Given how much of a mess the PC gaming scene has been thanks to the fierce competition between Steam and Epic Games Store – not to mention all the other digital storefront that keep popping up with alarming frequency – more unification of major libraries would go a long way toward smoothing the edges a bit. Here’s hoping it ends up happening sooner rather than later.