EA's Origin, meant to directly compete with Valve's popular Steam service, has come under quite a bit of fire recently. Invasive DRM, trivial and wanton player banning, you name it—suffice to say, it's not currently popular with the PC market, who don't believe they need anything but Steam.
Because Steam, after years of operation, pretty much gets it right. All your games in one place, easy transferring between devices, enormous sales, social aspects, achievements, and more keep Steam on most gamers' good sides. Can Origin, from a company gamers love to hate, really compete with that?
EA COO Peter Moore believes we shouldn't write it off yet. To be fair, it's grown to almost 10 million users in under a year, though that can be largely attributed to many EA games, including Battlefield 3, being Origin exclusives. (By the way, remember when EA pulled their games from Steam while pretending they weren't just setting them up to be Origin exclusives?)
"We need to continue to add social layers so there is value to the consumer," Moore told Kotaku, "so it doesn't feel like, in their words, 'something that is mandatory that I don't want.' And it got off to a rocky start for all the wrong reasons which were mostly inaccurate: accusations of spyware. The EULA… We were clearly focused on by some folks who said, 'We don't like this. How can we start picking things apart?'"
Should we give them the benefit of the doubt? If Origin is so awful, how can a million people be using it every day? Let us know in the comments or on Twitter.
