EA Play Subscription Service Arrives On Steam On August 31

Formerly known as EA Access, gaming subscription service EA Play is officially coming to Steam on August 31.

For the price of $4.99 a month, the service offers a curated library of EA titles as well as a 10% discount on all EA products that do not come with the subscription, notes ScreenRant.

With video game subscription services becoming more common, big services like Xbox Game Pass results in a lot of revenue for publishers as they offer fans a huge library of solid titles in the cloud to choose from. They would otherwise cost hundreds of dollars to accumulate those games for themselves.

Game subscription services go hand-in-hand with video game streaming as new developments that have been changing the video game experience. Services like Google Stadia and Microsoft's Project xCloud aim to give players the ability to stream AAA games to their phones and other devices while playing them without any loss in quality.

These attempts have had mixed results thus far, but the mere fact that there have been several tries to make it work proves how much the gaming industry believes in going down this digital route for the future.

Electronic Arts now prepares to bring its games to more digital customers by bringing its EA Play subscription service to Steam. After they got their own Steam page for EA Access, Electronic Arts merged EA Play with Origin Access, the company’s pre-existing PC game streaming service.

This marks a homecoming of sorts for EA as the developer all but abandoned Steam when it launched Origin in 2011. Origin was its own online marketplace that competed with Steam. In 2019, however, EA announced its Steam return and bringing newer games like “Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order” along with its back catalog.

EA titles have been steadily appearing on Steam since that time, leading to an increase in profit for the company. There is little doubt that EA Play’s arrival on Steam will likely continue that trend.

One of the arguments made against streaming and subscription services is that gamers may have access to so many games, but they become reliant on the whims of a publisher to decide when they can play what games. After all, Epic Games Store and other such services only allow free play of certain games for a limited period of time.

At the same time, though, it is difficult to argue against the sheer amount of quality titles offered at relatively low rates. EA Play on Steam promises to be a solid service with several good titles in its catalog thus giving the consumer another win.