Coming Soon to EA's Origin Store: Third-Party Titles 88
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."
Who cares? (Score:2)
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So what you're saying is that bugs can be fixed, and functionality can be added to software over time?
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Yeah, but that was Valve. This is EA.
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Only by a missing comma.
Read it as "If I want good games, companies like EA..."
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sadly. I also missed a comma after good games*,*.
Still, Crysis, Dead space, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Battlefield 3, Need For speed, The Old Republic, is a pretty impressive array of stuff.
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That's not really how content is consumed. 1 user for 4 months is really 1 user for 2 or 3 weeks, and then they're done with it, or it's 1 user for a year, and then your product is dead anyway. 3 or 4 users come with all sorts of issues. First, they need patches of course, which costs money to supply, second on average there's a certain support cost per user depending on what goes wrong, 1 guy, who needs your help getting it to work on his computer once, now balloons to 3 or 4. Theoretically they are cus
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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.
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At least on my console, if my sibling wants to go play a game I bought 4 years ago he can grab the game, pop it into his console, and he is good to go.
With Steam, it's tied to your account, forever. Same thing as if the instant you put a game into your console it copied it's contents to its HDD and shredded the disk.
I can't support Steam anymore because of this. (well, because of a lot of reasons, this just happened to be the last one and the one that caused me to finally call it quits)
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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 t
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I'd have to agree to this. I bought Sims 3 for my GF the other day - and it never showed up as install-able. So I contact customer service - 3 hours later (not kidding) we were no further along in solving this problem - I asked for my money back and they refunded it.
I told him that if I had pirated the game that it would been installed and working by now - he didn't seem to care probably because he was an outsourced drone in India (or whatever the nations favorite 3rd world country to profit on is this year
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Third party or third rate? (Score:5, Interesting)
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
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EA is run and owned by businessmen. Therefore, everything they do is strictly regulated by how some MBA thinks it should work. The result is that many of their games, and it looks like their store as well (I haven't and won't use it, unless something changes) aren't properly designed. The rule for that kind of software is to remind you about it as often as possible and shove as many products to sell in your face as possible (just like most real stores.) In fact, many of their games are becoming digital stor
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To be fair to the Steam platform, the launch time for me is down to just about five seconds, and the application has been consistently and perfectly responsive since they pushed out the latest round of updates. It's a massive improvement from the minute-long time from execution to a somewhat functional state that it featured just a year ago.
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EA is run and owned by businessmen.
Isn't that true for every single company on Earth? Well, I suppose there are some that aren't/weren't run by businessmen, but I think that falls under the classification, 'out of business'.
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EA is run and owned by businessmen.
Isn't that true for every single company on Earth?
No. The successful ones tend to be run by businessmen (and businesswomen) since either they get taken over by people who specialize in the running of businesses, or the founder/owner becomes more adept at running the business and becomes a business(wo)man. Businesses that aren't run as businesses at least somewhat tend to run out of money and fold, since controlling the assets — and especially the cash supply — is a core requirement of being a solvent business. There are a lot of "businesses" in
Also has worse DRM than steam (Score:1)
According to the EULA for Origin, it can scan your *entire* computer and see what is on it (not just games that you bought from them) and also track your use patterns of your non-Origin-purchased apps.
Sorry, that is too much. Get that crap out of the EULA, and then I might consider it (but from what others have said about its quality, probably still "no").
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I'm glad we're running this slashvertisement... (Score:3)
What isn't coming to origin's store (Score:3, Insightful)
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Yeah it's not like we have a shortage of digital distribution systems either. What 8 or 9 of them. If I have to be with one, I'll take steam. Mostly because they've been pretty good on ensuring that things like OBSE/FOSE/FVSE and all that work on their encrypted exe's. Ensuring that you know, games have extended modability. Sadly EA is already a known, fuck everyone over, everywhere, and tell them the like it. While killing off their 'consumed' studios. Origin, Bullfrog, Maxis, etc, and the most recen
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Dude, Origin isn't dead! It even has a store now! RTFA & HAND :)
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Yeah it's not like we have a shortage of digital distribution systems either. What 8 or 9 of them.
And given EA's inane experiments with DRM you're probably better off with a pirated ISO and a crack - no limited number of installs or crap like that. In their case it actually makes sense to pirate their games even if you bought them.
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Me neither; I cannot read it:
Chat Transcript
19/08/2011 08.59 AM
Hi, my name is Ackley. How may I help you?
Zennyboy: Hiya - this is not about whatever game I selected
Zennyboy: it's about Origin
Zennyboy: The Store?
Zennyboy: Hello?
Ackley:ok
Ackley:Please specify your issue
Zennyboy: I am English but live in Spain. I do not speak Spanish however. I am unable to make Origin web page 'go' into English whatever localization (in my profile, on the site) I select
Zennyboy: It's apparently reading off my geolocation and
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And why on God's Green Earth should he have to do that?
Successful e-commerce makes purchasing so brain-dead simple, and so convenient, that you'll buy things you wouldn't normally buy--it doesn't make it so complicated and/or annoying that you're forced to find a brick & mortar retailer to complete your purchase.
This is why people rave about Steam and rant about Origin. Thank goodness for competition; at least one of the parties recognizes that their *business* depends on treating their customers like
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Nail, meet head...
I have a Steam account. I can run it in English, German, whatever. The games it downloads can be in any available language. I do not want to get games in Real Shops as I'll lose the disc, the key or whatever, and unless they're tied to an online shop, they could be missing English on the disc anyway. Steam allows me to use a UK CC when sitting in Spain.
It just bugs the hell out of me when some website assumes in Europe France=French, Spain=Spanish, Italy=Italian. It is so much not like th
Great (Score:2)
Now all it needs is third-party costumers.
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And you will know (Score:1)
Wait.. Anyone else here?
Who am I supposed to tell about the power of Origin?
Oh bugger.
ridiculousness (Score:3)
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exactly - origin "we create worlds" was doing something that companies since have not managed to do as much, actually creating worlds.
which can be hardly said about DA2.. compared to ultima 6 anyhow. despite apparently the money poured to it being much greater, but hey, I guess flaky facial expression generator is better than a sandbox world that takes some effort to script.
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Well if you didn't see it yet, GOG.com released Ultima 1-4 last week and Ultima 5-6 this week. If you can sit patiently for about another week, I expect you'll be satisfied.
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Ah, I thought you might have (since you were awfully specific about which ones). Well, I'd personally much rather buy them from GOG than from the EA store, so I'm pretty happy EA went with that channel.
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EA wouldnt have a clue on what to do with Ultima anyway, the last thing I hear about Ultima was that they were planning a browser game ala sims.
I guess nowadays if they brought out another Ultima it would be a sports game (Avatar Soccer) or a WW2 Shooter (Ultima 11 the adventures of the Avatar in Desden)
lol (Score:2)
Just got a battlefield ad when I came to the page =)
Anyways, if EA wants to open their own store ala Steam I wish them all the luck in the world, but I would seriously hope that EA and Valve would allow their games to be inter-sold on the other platforms. I for one don't give a rats butt about Origin, I'd miss EA games from steam. Vice versa, if I was an Origin fan, I'd hate not seeing Steam / SteamPowered games being sold through the service. Ditto for Games for windows.
Maybe what this really needs in the
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Personally I would like to see EA games that were actually worth the money they charge for them.
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Ditto for Games for windows.
GFWL is evil and should be killed with fire. The sooner developers realize that the better. I've used it as well as steam and origin and out of the three I find that only GFWL is truly unusable...
Simple strategy - works every time (Score:2)
....when you have a working business model and your profit margin is excellent, you must follow the "Gaming Code":
1. Get scared that something isn't right because you're doing so well.
2. Add something that is counter-intuitive, defined as such by the very name of the product.
3. Profit more.
4. GOTO 1.
*giggle*
The summary is inaccurate regarding Steam (Score:1)
The service has not restricted digital downloads on other stores. EA games are available on the other digital stores. The specific problem is between EA and Steam. Valve does not allow Steam games to sell and make available DLC through their own stores; everything must go through Steam. EA doesn't want to rewrite their games to work with Steam's store (which would cost EA time/money to do and to maintain the separate Steam version, and then on top of that Valve would take a cut on every DLC), so they're at
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No, that's just EA's propaganda to hide their real reason. Steam absolutely allows companies to sell their own DLC separate from Steam. Just look at the DLC for Mass Effect or Dragon Age or Oblivion.
EA's real reason is obvious. They want their platform, Origin, to be the market leader. To do that, they need to dethrone Steam. So they pull all of their games from Steam, hoping to weaken the platform. They allow their games to stay on Direct2Drive and Impulse and the like, because they don't perceive th
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Uh, Dragon Age 2 was pulled from Steam right after EA released the first DLC for it, as were a couple other recent EA games. This has only apparently started to happen recently.
Has Valve come out to contradict EA's claims? Why not?
NHL (Score:1)
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because if so, im just going to stop gaming.
Just like the crack user - yeah yeah you'll be back. But I'll put your prices up.
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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.
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Origin is anti-competitive, because EA has pulled their games from Steam.
And nothing of value was lost.
piratebay.org (Score:1)
... will always be my favorite game distribution plataform...
NO THANK YOU (Score:2)
I don't care if its the best game ever and is free, I will refuse to use it
NOT coming soon... (Score:1)
We don't need another friend list. (Score:2)
Even if the store isn't broken and works flawlessly (and from what I've heard, that is a big if), I'm still opposed to exclusive Origin titles just on general principles. Withdrawing titles from other services is a huge pain in the ass for the consumer, and does a huge disservice to PC gaming as a whole. It fragments the PC community even more, creating yet another friends list you need to keep track of, and yet another program that needs to be running. Ultimately, PC games can only benefit from a single
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No worries about EA, as long as customers literally plunge billions into rehashed sports titles every year and plunge about the same amount into lame shooters EA wont go belly up or will see a need to change their ways.
I would say it is the fault of the Madden etc... customers that EA is well - EA.