Markus "Notch" Persson has said that his Mojang studio is in talks with Valve in the hope of making Minecraft available through Steam, but admits there is an "inherent incompatibility" between the two firms' approaches.
Much has been made of Valve's terms and conditions concerning how developers and their customers interact, with EA blaming them for the removal of several of its games from the service. Minecraft, meanwhile, is still in beta, with Persson and his team constantly adding new content since its release last year. Writing on his blog, Persson praises Steam but admits that, as things stand, Minecraft can not be sold through Valve's download service.
"Steam is the best digital distribution platform I've ever seen," he writes. "I've spent incredible amounts of money on it, and I own a crazy amount of games on it.
"But being on Steam limits a lot of what we're allowed to do with the game, and how we're allowed to talk to our users. We (probably?) wouldn't be able to, say, sell capes or have a map marketplace on Minecraft.net that works with Steam customers in a way that keeps Valve happy.
"It would effectively split the Minecraft community in two parts, where only some of the players can access all of the weird content we want to add to the game."
All of which sounds broadly similar to EA's stance. Several of its games have recently been removed from Steam, and the upcoming Battlefield 3 will not be available through Steam either. However, the publisher moved to quash speculation that it was attempting to force consumers over to its own rival distribution service, Origin, which launched in June. Instead EA blamed Steam's "restrictive terms of service which limit how developers interact with customers to deliver patches and other downloadable content."
For Persson, however, there is no stamping of feet, no insistence that he gets his way. "We are talking to Valve about this," he writes, "but I definitely understand their reasons for wanting to control their platform. There's a certain inherent incompatibility between what we want to do and what they want to do. There's no big argument, we just don't want to limit what we can do with Minecraft."
EA and Valve are in talks, too, with Gabe Newell last week saying he hoped to resolve the dispute. While EA may have an ulterior motive as it seeks to establish Origin as a true alternative to Steam, Persson makes it clear he's not taking EA's side. "Steam is awesome," he writes. "Much more awesome than certain other digital distribution platforms that we would not want to release Minecraft on."
Source: Word Of Notch