Online Retailers Refusing To Sell Modern Warfare 2

Major online retailer Direct2Drive have announced today that the year’s biggest game – Modern Warfare 2 – won’t be made available on their PC digital delivery service. Why? Because of rival platform Steam, of course!

Activision’s shooter includes mandatory installation of Valve’s Steamworks, which the game uses for stuff like installation, DRM and save-game management. Something Direct2Drive (which is owned by website IGN) are having none of, telling us “We don’t believe games should force the user to install a Trojan Horse”. That “Trojan Horse” being the inclusion of Steam’s commercial marketplace.

D2D also told Kotaku that, having evaluated some Steamworks titles earlier in the year (such as Empire: Total War and Dawn of War II) and finding the forced inclusion of Steam’s storefront (offering automatic competition to D2D’s own services) not to their liking, told publishers that they’d stop selling games bundled in such a manner until Valve “decoupled its retail marketplace” from Steam’s other services.

To be clear, D2D’s beef is not with Activision, it’s with Steam, and to prove there’s no bad blood between the retailer and mega-publisher, $5 coupons will soon be offered on select Activision titles to make up for it.

UPDATE – Seems Impulse have come out today and also confirmed they won’t be stocking the game, for the same reasons.

UPDATE 2 – Digital store Gamersgate have told Kotaku that, like D2D and Impulse, they will also not be stocking Modern Warfare 2, and again, for the same reason.