The simple fact of the matter EA is a huge company, and who REALLY knows how they handle their distributions. As far as we know they could hold a agreement with these select few companies and will not accept other 'hosting solutions' have a piece of that pie. It's a funny concept given their entire slandering other game providers for their method/solution for game-server technology(specifically codmw2 and its p2p solution) yet these go as far as saying that they would NEVER do something like that to gain some
PR points and turn around and do something JUST as bad. Limiting hosting providers. I have heard the nightmare stories of many G.S.P.s fighting this EA tragic battle with the same outcome. A Sale-mate solution, probably only to prevent a
PR disaster. This is a slippery slope they are playing on, Video Game distributors policing the server-side content providers/hosting.