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.

Could this hurt the PC versions sales in long run?

This game needs to bomb hard because it's causing way too much trouble for PC users.

It seems like it might not do as well has MW1 did in terms of PC sales.

Wow, just wow. Activision is bound and determined to make the PC version suck as hard as possible. I include decisions made by IW as part of Activision's attempt to make the game hassle filled as possible. Does the disc version also include Steam? I imagine Gamestop, and a few other retailers will probably refuse to, or under-stock the game.

This seems like a decision that could increase Steam sales in the short term.

"We don't believe games should force the user to install a Trojan Horse." EPIC WIN!

yet MW2 is only staying at 6th place on Steam, far below what COD4 did. COD4 stayed 1st place on Steam for months, and it probably took almost a year for COD4 to get out of Top5.

Plus, COD4 also dominated on Direct2Drive for nearly a year, and is being sold on Impulse and Gamersgate. MW2 will sell crap compared to COD4.

People probably realize that it is pointless to pre-order a digitally distributed game.

Doesn't matter. Pre-orders are probably the best time for MW2 to sell as high as it can on Steam, because after it comes out and people see MW2 be such a crappy game, the word of mouth will be abysmal.

Both Dragon Age and L4D2 were/ are at the top of the Steam charts before they came out. People often pre-order so they can pre-load the game and be ready to play as soon as it's unlocked. This isn't happening at all for COD6- it hasn't been in the top 5 for the last fortnight, and nearly dropped out of the top ten altogether at one point, only the recent price reduction on COD4 seems to have sparked any interest in it.

It's very telling when a simple Diablo clone like Torchlight has outsold it consistently over the last week and a half, especially when you consider the steam chart is based on revenue and Torchlight is 2/5 the price of COD6. It looks like it's a complete flop.