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Coming Soon to EA's Origin Store: Third-Party Titles
First time accepted submitter RGDfleet writes with news snipped from Gamer Gaia, based on a report in GameSpot UK: "For around three months now EA's Origin store, previously known as the EA Store, has been providing digital copies of just about any EA title post-2009. In fact, Origin has been exclusively EA ever since its inception and has featured no games from other publishers. On top of this the service has restricted access of EA titles on competitor providers such as Steam, Battlefield 3 perhaps being the leading example. This week however, EA CFO Eric Brown confirmed that they intend to start bringing third party content to Origin."
The application is crappy and has to remind you EVERY SINGLE TIME you minimise it that it's still running.
It's a cash grab and as such is developed by morons.
I have to relogin every few boots due to it forgetting it was logged in. Steam has it beat, I don't even realise steam is running until I go to use it.
Origin has a splash screen that doesn't minimise on boot, and then when I close that it throws a popup that it's still running. NO SHIT SHERLOCK
Because I was worried that EA wasn't making enough money. This should help that!
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
me
The name of the store is CALLED Origin. Why on earth have they not put up any actual Origin GAMES? Post-2009? Give me a break, let me buy Ultima 7-X.
Yeah, but that was Valve. This is EA.
Sure, but Origin is competing with today's Steam, not the Steam of 2004.
Only by a missing comma.
Read it as "If I want good games, companies like EA..."
Here's some other examples, equally cherry-picked, this time showing Amazon to be 50-100% more expensive than Steam:
Oblivion GOTY Edition
Steam $19.99
Amazon $29.99
Heroes of Might and Magic V
Steam: $9.99
Amazon $14.99
Civilization V
Steam $12.50
Amazon $27.45
Steam prices are fine. And there's already price competition from Direct2Drive and Impulse. Origin is anti-competitive, because EA has pulled their games from Steam.
I don't care if its the best game ever and is free, I will refuse to use it
Most steam games don't have DRM. Most you can play even after you cancel a steam account. and even the ones that do have drm (none that I own, I have 20+ steam games) it's not really the shitty kind of drm, relativity. Also steam lets you re-download your entire library to a new computer free of charge.
Cancelling isn't the same as getting banned, actually, I don't think you can cancel a steam account, since there's no recurring billing, once you've paid, you've paid, and you can't launch a steam bought game without steam (or at least aren't supposed to be able to). If you disagree with steam over billing they'll immediately ban your account and lock you out of all your steam games. It *is* a DRM platform, as are consoles. They wrap that up by providing services or simplicity, but they're still DRM.
I should expand on what I said. Steam *is* drm. It may offer other features, but it's sole purpose in life is to be DRM. Once you've bought something with them it's tied to your steam account, and whatever they decide can happen to the content of that steam account. You cannot resell it, you can install it as many times or as few times as they allow. To activate a product with steam you have to connect to the steam service, if steam is offline you cannot activate, and, in many cases you won't be able to start your game (depends what api features the developer uses, and if you support offline mode).
You can add a game to steam that you've bought independently, say world of warcraft (that isn't available on steam), in that case nothing happens if valve blows up and steam is out of business. If you've bought your game through steam on the other hand.... You can back up your game, but you can't reactivate it without the steam service.
Steam is also there to prevent cheating, which is a form of DRM, though one players tend to be in favour of obviously. Which is what i was getting at about it offering a service as well. By making it harder to pirate you tend to make it harder to cheat and the reverse.