Yesterday I thought, okay I'll give Origin a chance, let's buy Alice. After the absolutely clunky search I managed to get it into my cart. Made the checkout, filled in my personal info and had to scroll down to see that Alice was in German. So I switched to English (UK) and I had to fill out my personal info again. *Sigh* After the payment with Paypal I had no clue what actually happened. Alice is not in my game list, 1 hour later I get the email that I bought Alice. No additional info.
Seriously, their software is shit. The usability is non existent, their pricing is worse than Steam. (HERP DEE DERP $ == €)
Give me a reason why I should buy another game again? It's a poor attempt and not one thing is better than on Steam. Absolutely nothing! And that's just piss poor for such a big company that should know better after their 3rd revision.
I don't give a damn about who will sell me. Since I don't have to pay the import taxes that would I pay buying the retail.
With this move EA just isolates itself and they do their own thing which really pisses me off. I knew when I saw the announcement that this can't mean anything good and now we are forced again to take a big step back. Origin is a downloader and file encrypter. Steam is so much more. A community, Steamcloud, Voice Chat, Achievments, ... And then you have Origin. lulz
If I can't get it on Steam or a regular download I won't be getting it. Screw adding another Steam like client.
How is this any different from having to own 3 different consoles, each with their own accounts?
That same segmentation is coming to pc gaming in a big way. Every EA game will be on origin. Every Valve game on Steam. Will GOG start making their games exclusive? Who else? Its coming.
And who didn't expect EA to create their own store? No one, we all saw it coming. And this comes as no surprise, either. If you want future EA games, you need an Origin account, just like you need a 360 for Gears of War, or a ps3 for Uncharted.
Dick move.
Lots of hate on both sides, but I think it is a dick move on EA because they should have initally lanched Orgin with Crisis 2 so that the consumers did not have to migrate and well do work to play the game.
I am not saying steam is perfect, sometimes you cannot log in when a big game lanches. But Valve really set the bar high when it came to digital ditribution. Not that D2D is not cool, but it really is just a simple copy of steam without the rare great deals.
For the people angery because the daily deals are not good, why would you think daily deals would be better than the black friday deasl? when last years greatist games on PC are five dollors.
Pricing is set by the publisher, that is why COD4 is still $30 (way to much )
Orgin sounds interesting, however I think it will not be quite as succesful mainly due to the fact steam has many devlopers games and orgin has only EA games.
TO be frank EA has never been a good devloper, only a good distrubter so I really do not see me buying any of their products anytime soon, exspecially since the completely F***ed up C&C or comand and conquer, need for speed, adn james bond.
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Second paragraph scare the shit out of me.10 years from now when im playing on my 20GHz 40 core machine with with 10 gigs of video ram i know i will be able to redownload any steam game i own if i want to.This is very important to me since i hate collecting CD,s and DVD,s.EA can pull the plug any time they want and your shit out of luck.
God i wanna rent a helicopter and fly over EAs headquarters and shit on bobby kotick.
@Cowkaynee Monkeystrudle: What would Kotick be doing at EA?
Hundreds of dollars?! I mean, sign in this services is free. I get your point but I’m just thinking. To play a console exclusive you have to make a investment. It’s not like you buy Demon’s Souls and get a PS3 for free. But with steam or origin or any other DD service, there’s no investment. So the fidelity to the services it’s more a question of fate. And how you do that?! how do you convince people to change their religion?
This is a pretty dickish move by EA though.
EA has the right to do this. I do not dispute the legal grounds to do so. But don't praise EA or Activision for doing so on the grounds that this is some how open and fair competition. Fair competition would involve going head to head with Steam in a price and feature war, not trying to starve them out.
EA isn't interested in competing. It's sole interest is creating a direct line between themselves and your wallet, so that consumers have as few options as possible. We will rue the day that publishers and platform holders take total control of the supply chain. A market with that few players is hardly a market at all, and resembles a cartel. It'll be like the airlines! Happy day!
Can we hold Valve and Steam to the same argument then? You can't purchase any of Valve's games from Direct 2 Drive or Impulse or Origins. The only place you can buy Half-Life, Orange Box, or Portal 2 is Steam.
Like I said, it's shitty all around...but let's not prop up Steam like they're above all this. Steam evolved into what we have today, the client initially delivered games much like Origin and then added features along the way. It just seems we're awfully quick to vilify one over the other, when both are essentially doing the same.
http://www.vg247.com/2011/06/15/crysis-2-now-only-on-origin-d2d-impulse-more/
If this turns out to be true, it sort of negates the whole point of this post. Wonder if Jim will then point the finger at his beloved Steam and their 'competitive' policies...highly doubt it. Either way, the consumer is getting screwed and Valve is certainly elbow deep.
You raise an excellent point. In a freer market, Valve would be willing to license their content to other platforms.
I guess I find it slightly less disconcerting in Valve's case, because of scale. Since Valve's inception, they've released what, 23 titles? EA or Activision could probably manage that output in 2-3 years. I love Valve, but their creative output into this industry, special while it is, doesn't match the sheer volume of the foot print large publishers have.
Also the scale of the Origin's offerings. They aren't (currently, anyway) providing a friendly environment for non-EA titles to come to market. They may in the future, but Origin right now is a closed market.
really? Last time I checked EA has 4 of the top 10 best selling franchises of all time. Selling well over 300 million titles just between those 4.
I actually did see Portal 2 in the Origin Store.
I'm sure EA would love for other developers to sell their products on Origin, but I imagine getting said developers to trust you after EA burning so many bridges would be the issue.
"If it had been on Steam, and offered the free copy of the original, it would have been a sale."
Do you even know how that sounds? Or what that train of thought, if it were really to get more passengers, would do to the industry? If you had said "I'd wait for a sale" or "I'd wait for the price to go down" or something, it'd be totally different, but outright saying "I need a free game with this to make this a sale" is.. I don't know.. Horrific.
No new release should have to be packaged with game packaged in with it just to make a sale, whether the game is a totally unrelated title or the game that started the whole series. If the game can't get you in on its own, without needing an entire other game to piggy back on just because its a freebee, then the game isn't worth your time or you weren't really that interested in the first place. And it certainly means the publishers/retailers/whomever really didn't try THAT hard to sell (or make) the game good enough. Driving people over some imaginary edge just because they're getting a 2 for 1 deal on a title that may not even deserve the support is a very lazy way to fluff your numbers and seriously will only end up leading to shittier games in the long run, when developers start to decide to say "Well, we can pack this game in and not bother with polishing the back half of <insert game name here>"
And yeah, the only real problem I had with the Sony show at E3 was that they obviously feel the need to attempt to drive Bioshock Infinite and Battlefield 3 sales up by packing in Bioshock and Battlefield 1943 (respectively) with the game, on the same disc -2 games that are already going to sell a hell of a lot of copies on the system because the system will (or at least should) make them look better. Some would call it "costumer appreciation", but really does seem to be just pandering when you consider that point.
Steam is at a point of acceptance where "slightly better prices" isn't enough to entice people to alternatives.
Have you noticed that Steam now carries Free-to-Play games? Games that were available for free on the internet, some with quite simple installs no less, have gone to Steam to be published simply to get noticed. And it seems to be working, at least going by comments in posts that reported the news. People who would never have bothered with a Free-to-Play game's original site and install are now trying the games through Steam.
When people think of online PC game distribution, they think of Steam. They look for games at Steam and ignore the other sites. They'll even complain about Games for Windows Live, and then buy a Steam version of a game that contains GFWL.
@Katherine Leigh McHugh
Steam isn't the only site that offers sales. Direct2Drive and GamersGate both offer sales. Torchlight is $5.08 on GamersGate for today, and a while back I think Direct2Drive had it for under $5?
It also caused me to look further into Origin. Price gouging ($75US for a game) because I'm from another country, check. Need to install another client which is nothing but a form of DRM, check. Terrible TOS (games may expire in 2 years, limited to 5 installs), check. GEE, I'm sure glad for competition. Here's how to make me want your service, offer me better deals than anywhere else. Hell, just do what Valve does and offer me your games at the same price as your US customers instead of trying to rip me off.
Steam has a loyal following because people like to have a collection all in one place (convergence) and because it resurrected PC gaming to be more than just a WoW platform. It was also initially disguised as something other than a marketplace, adding value to the product (auto patching was amazing for CS: Source). EA is just doing a blatant cash grab. Making your games exclusive to your DRM distribution service will just increase piracy because PC gamers are self entitled bastards that won't put up with your bullshit.
I'm raging so hard at the mere thought of ME3 being Origin exclusive I probably won't be able to concentrate on the exam I have in 10mins. Fuck you EA. Fuck you.
totally concur.

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