Electronic Arts Joins Steam

EA was always one of the big, noticeable holdouts on Valve's totally boss digital distribution service, Steam. So it's still kind of crazy to see that the publisher has finally signed on and has made a portion of its recent catalog available on the service.

At the moment, the following games are available:

• Spore
• Spore Creepy & Cute Parts Pack
• Warhammer Online
• Mass Effect
• Need for Speed Undercover
• FIFA Manager 09

PC versions of Mirror's Edge, Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3, and Dead Space are all coming soon.

If you've listened to the podcast, you've probably heard stories about EA's own online store, which does a bunch of goofy stuff like charging you if you want to be able to redownload your purchased games for an extended period of time. That's bad. Steam? Steam's pretty good. So it's good to see another viable digital alternatives for the EA catalog.

It'll be interesting to see if EA sticks with the new stuff or starts mining its back catalog by releasing XP/Vista-friendly versions of some of its old DOS games.