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EA just added classics like Dungeon Keeper, SimCity 3000, and Populous on Steam (www.theverge.com)

submitted 6 months ago by Ninjazzon@infosec.pub to c/games@lemmy.world

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There hasn’t been a lot of good news out of EA lately, but here’s some: the company just launched a bunch of classic games on Steam. The new (old) releases include nine games in total, spanning franchises like Dungeon Keeper, Populous, and SimCity.

Here’s the full list:

Command & Conquer The Ultimate Collection

SimCity 3000 Unlimited

Populous

Populous II: Trials of the Olympian Gods

Populous: The Beginning

Dungeon Keeper Gold

Dungeon Keeper 2

Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri Planetary Pack

The Saboteur

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[-] Aielman15@lemmy.world 45 points 6 months ago

I'm sure most of them have already been available on GoG for quite some time, I don't know what took them so long to port them over competing storefronts.

[-] bassomitron@lemmy.world 14 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Maybe they had an agreement with GOG? This is all personal speculation, but GOG was primarily known as Good Old (Ol'?) Games for a long time, as they would put that under their GOG acronym back in the day. It was essentially a storefront that primarily dealt with classics and keeping them available to consumers before they pivoted and started also focusing a lot on modern games. Maybe my memory is flawed and I'm completely misremembering the old GOG and they've always focused on modern games as well, so anyone feel free to correct me if that's the case.

Anyway, I wouldn't be surprised if GOG struck a deal with a lot of publishers for selling all their classics exclusively. On the flip side, it could also be that the publishers just didn't care enough about their old offerings to put any effort into porting them into other storefronts. Now that retrogaming is much more ubiquitous than it once was, some bean counter pitched this idea in a mid-quarter profit seeking brainstorming meeting and here we are.

[-] DAMunzy@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 6 months ago

GOG doesn't have the money to do exclusives like Epic Games.

[-] bassomitron@lemmy.world 4 points 6 months ago

I wouldn't think getting exclusive access to 20+ year old games that are mostly obscure would cost very much, but who knows. It was just a theory either way.

[-] DAMunzy@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 6 months ago

Good point that old games mightn't cost as much to exclusivise

[+] schmidtster@lemmy.world -10 points 6 months ago

literally in the bloody article lmfao.

[-] BossDj@lemm.ee 14 points 6 months ago

I didn't see where it says why they took so long to add to Steam?

[-] Sabata11792@kbin.social 2 points 6 months ago

It's a competitor, they only started using Steam since the profit is better than the pride.

[-] BossDj@lemm.ee 4 points 6 months ago

Steam wins on market share. You'd think they would have started on steam if it was to make more money, or added them to Steam a long time ago. I'm sure their reasoning is sound, just curious what it was. Licensing deals, listing cost, whatever. Maybe they waited for all the true believers to get it on gog and now hope they'll all buy again on steam for the achievements. By pride do you mean the Origin failure?

[-] Sabata11792@kbin.social 6 points 6 months ago

Steam takes a 30% cut of the profit last I read. EA tried to avoid this with Orgin to not pay that 30%. I assume Steam sales have to be pretty good VS Orgin numbers keep using Steam.

People hate using extra launchers, and EA has a reputation of being comic book villain evil. I assume any tiny bits of good will they get from customers is rare and this is low hanging fruit. People also love Steam to the point of not buying a game without it. The 30% cut probably seemed worth the trade for the wriggling masses running EA.