No BC Rearmed on Steam

Capcom has been unable to release Bionic Commando Rearmed on Steam after all.

"At the last minute, we've been unable to reach mutually agreeable terms with Valve on BCR, so they won't be carrying it," VP of strategic planning and biz dev Christian Svensson wrote on the Capcom forums yesterday.

"I won't get into the details but we do continue to have a good relationship with Valve and future Capcom titles we expect to be carried on Steam." He went on to deny that Capcom is unhappy with the percentage Valve takes from Steam transactions.

All of this means that if PC owners want to buy Bionic Commando Rearmed, which picked up an 8/10 in our review on Wednesday, they will have to buy it from the Capcom online shop, or a rival digital distribution service like Direct2Drive or Gamer's Gate, both of which should have the game today.

Capcom's fans being as hardcore as a Megaman level, they proceeded to kick Svensson's head in for half a dozen forum pages.

In Capcom's defence, Svensson pointed out that the company has done a few things to try and improve the experience for PC owners. For instance, he said, the publisher is subsidising a two-year period of unlimited access to re-download the content from Digital River (the infrastructure for the Capcom shop), because the default 30 days "wasn't good enough".

He also said that it's his goal to get Capcom games on a service where that support can last "for as long as we're in business".

Bionic Commando Rearmed, which re-imagines the classic NES platform game and introduces wicked new multiplayer and Challenge Room levels, costs USD 14.99 - and is also available on Xbox Live Arcade for 800 Microsoft Points (GBP 6.80 / EUR 9.60).

In the US, the game's also out on the PlayStation Store for PS3, but the European release has been held up due to - we speculate - localisation demands. When it does appear, it will cost GBP 6.99 / EUR 9.99.