Valve Boss: EA Origin Isn't ''Doing Anything Super-Well Yet''
Gabe Newell had quite a few things to say about EA's Origin service on the Seven Day Cooldown podcast.
EA’s do
wnload distribution service, Origin, essentially a makeover for the old EA Store, launched the summer of last year. Although EA assured that the service wasn’t meant to be a competitor for Valve’s Steam, curiously, various EA titles became “Origin” exclusive or disappeared off of Steam’s virtual shelves. EA pointed an accusing finger at Steam, blaming Steam’s download policies for EA’s title’s removal. In all but words, EA is going for a bout of fisticuffs with Valve.
Valve head Gabe Newell had some interesting things to say about Origin. When asked on the Seven Day Cooldown podcast about his thoughts on the Origin service, Newell stated, “I don’t think they’re [Origin] doing anything super-well yet.” He believes that Origin, since it’s still relatively new to the market as a digital distribution service, is at a disadvantage because “they’re still playing catch up” and as a result, they’ve yet to really build anything that’s “useful to software developers or gamers.”
However, Newell did have some positive comments about EA as well. He stated that Valve would still want EA’s games on Steam’s virtual shelves, but if “EA wants to take their shot at their own alternative to Steam, and if they’re successful at that and their customers like that then that’s great.” He hopes that EA will listen to Valve’s advice that bringing EA games to Steam would please Valve customers, after all, “Tim Sweeney [Epic Games founder] doesn't look at Steam and say 'we shouldn't support that because that will hurt long term sales of the Unreal Engine'. He's like, 'that's pretty cool, that's pretty useful'. So hopefully EA get their head to the same place.”
EA and Origin have been facing a lot of criticism from fans, mostly due to bad customer support. However, it seems that EA’s been taking steps to turn Origin’s image around, recently introducing an update to Origin’s account policies that allow banned players to continue to access their games. Although it’s highly unlikely, maybe EA will continue to listen to their fans’ pleas to bring EA games back to Steam.
Perhaps if you had a clearer understanding of history as recent as within the last 12 months, you'd be familiar with the reason why EA pulled their games from the Steam service in the first place. Their products that weren't originally part and parcel to the Origin service were rolled into it to essentially fill the role of the old EA downloader, which is presently defunct. The games were pulled from Steam because Valve attempted to assert a DLC policy concerning Battlefield 3 in particular that was disagreeable to EA and bordered on harmful to other retailers that EA supplies both retail game copies as well as DLC to. Regardless of how you want to look at EA, both they and Valve are eminently shrewd and you shouldn't be misled into thinking there is any good guy or bad guy when it comes to corporate relations in the world. That's an entirely too simple light to view things in.
I agree, for the most part, they don't have a lot of stuff for sale yet on origin. But they are still growing.
I'll use them to buy stuff whenever it's cheap or something I want, the same as I do on steam.
I've gotten 4.5 mb/s here (japan)
Just change the servers steam uses to the US ones and you'll see your download speeds improve almost immediately. Its the same for me in Australia, I get okay'ish speeds but when I change to the US servers my game downloads fly.
From what I understand, Steams game policy is this: If your game has DLC, it must be available to steam users. EA went out of their way and made some crysis 2 dlc exclusive to some other service, and Steam pulled the plug.
(then Crysis 2 went ahead and won the most pirated game of the year award)
with STEAM i get games from 10 developers inside the same software !
I had a very good laugh at this line. Money/greed, deception, price-jacking, etc/ are synonymous with EA. Their PR can try and spread jokes like the line above all they want, but their reputation has a deep history and most consumers know better to not trust what this company has to say. Too bad I haven't been able to play ME3, Crysis 2, or DA 2 yet, my antivirus keeps flagging this thing called Origin as malware
Oh I understand it just fine thank you. My main issue isn't with Origin itself (even if I hate that I need to have yet another leaky service with my personal info just to play a game) but with EA that is by now well known for its hatred towards paying customers.
And one very good point made in this thread is that Steam covers a lot of publishers. Origin covers EA, period. So when will we have BethesdaStore? ID-Wallet? MojangShop? ActivisionDollarSqueezer? Every publisher makes their own little store, just to pump customers of more personal info, draconian copy protections and buggy inbetween-software to slow down and cripple our computers... Steam was first and it has developed to a well respected and well used service. And one would think that companies would try to use the most known and most populated services to promote their software, not to make small stores of their own carrying a handful of games instead of thousands like Steam.
And I also know very well the corporate world is everything but a dance on roses but here I choose the lesser of two evils - Valve. Valve has quality products behind them, a well established customer support and they listen to their fans. EA has gone from a respected developer to a black hole where there is no escape from - once EA sets their sight on a good developer they get sucked in and forced to make crappy console rehashes and endless sequels, each worse than the previous. I can't remember when the last time I was really excited over an EA game. Valve has continued to suprise me with excellent titles that stand up to time even today. Half-Life series. Portal series. Team Fortress 2. Heck, even Counter-Strike which I refuse to touch, but I can still see the quality behind it. With EA it's been endless crap products that may have looked nice at the surface, but quickly fell apart as soon as you touched it. And these endless sequels... The Sims series being the most notorious ones. The utter crappy Need For Speed series they dragged through the mud. And now Battlefield going the same way. There is just no end to their hunger of swallowing up creative studios and remaking them into drones, forking out one bad sequel after another.
There was once a time I pulled a smile everytime I heard "EA Games - It's In the Game!". Today it's more "Oh crap, I hope this isn't one more cheesy console port sequel...". And yes, I am old enough to have experienced Skate Or Die! which was their first game. i still have the original floppy.
Sorry for the long post, but I just don't have much respect for EA anymore after their swallowed up and killed most of my favorite developer studios - Bullfrog, Interplay, Binary Systems, Origin Systems (Wing Commander
EA, give Valve a nice present, kiss and make up and strike some kind of deal. For the good of the customers.
No it's not. When we used to have to make individual boot disks for games and reboot the computer every time we wanted to play, that was a PITA. Starting two separate programs is not inconvenient at all, especially considering you can start both with Windows.
Steam has a larger library of games, better deals, and better community features. Origin has a smaller footprint, faster download speeds, and lets you choose where to install games. As far as game launchers, they both do their job equally well.