Seems like EA tends to notice trends without paying any attention to what people are saying.
Let me be honest, nobody with half a brain likes digital distribution even a little bit. People do not like having no control over what they buy. As the industry started forcing people onto digital platforms, where even buying a disc just made you DL it online anyway, STEAM wound up becoming a darling by dropping their prices. The big arguement was why should someone pay the same price for a product they don't control and represents a risk through dependance on a digital service. Noticing that the promised lowering of prices that was going to come with digital distribution never manifested, as publishers just kept prices the same and pocketed the money saved on discs, packaging, shipping, and other things. STEAM has shown that they can lower the prices of games by as much as 75% (even on fairly new titles) and still make a profit. When your paying $5-$10 for a game as opposed to $50 ot $60 it softens the impact. STEAM is kind of keeping the promise with their sales that digital would lower the cost of gaming substantially... and people have noticed that.
Origin really brings nothing to the table, it's intrusive, and has all the negatives of digital services, but also charges top dollar for it's games. There is no benefit from buying from Origin as opposed to having a disc in hand without any kind of DRM, it costs the same thing as buying a game in a brick and mortar store.
What's more EA kind of shot themselves in the foot with the recent rants about how STEAM sales were "devalueing Intellectual Property" when really they kind of show what games should cost, as opposed to what EA wants to sell them for and the monster profits it wants to make.
There is also the matter of STEAM's community, their support isn't the best, but it is there, and tends to get the job done, there are a good number of users, a lot of differant groups, and a lot of tie ins through STEAM like their give away sites, and everything else.
What's more as STEAM was the first to the party, most people who obtained digital content there became invested in the service in part to keep their digital games all in one place. Having to worry about five or six differant sites for differant games is a pain in the rear. What's more STEAM's prices encourage you to buy more and more stuff from them, as opposed to taking a "we have you by the wrinklies since your here already, now we are going to squeeze".
Oh yes, and Origin generally sucks in terms of support. Back when I pre-ordered TOR EA messed up with the codes they send to gamestop. My CE of TOR wound up being registered as a standard edition. Upon getting a proper code for a CE pre-order I couldn't put the code into my account since it had the standard version listed and you couldn't upgrade a product you already had. Customer service told me to make a second account until they could resolve the problem, and they would eventually merge the accounts. In the process of juggling two accounts I wind up making mistakes an installing a couple of games to each (since I have to logout and then log back in), leading to me having to play games with Origin every time I want to play Amalur or TOR, or whatever else, to make sure I'm under the right account. Origin has yet to merge my accounts or find any way to solve this problem, and every time I've sent inquiries it's been ignored... the root of this problem all coming from EA screwing up their pre-order codes, making promises to merge placeholder accounts used for the proper accounts, and then never bothering to work on their system archetecture.
Indeed I just cancelled my TOR account, I've been playing a lot of other games on and off, and honestly juggling Origin back and forth finally got to be too annoying for me. I've pretty much stopped playing all of my games on Origin, and really, despite having hundreds of dollars in software tied up in it, I'm probably just going to cut my losses instead of continueing to mess around with it.
In short EA and Origin blow chips, they can't update products based on better versions of the same thing (upgrading from standard to collector's), and even after months they have yet to find ways to do things like merge multiple accounts which is something they had allegedly been working on since the first day TOR pre-orders became availible.
EA wonders why people hate Origin, well, they should ask what they have ever done to get people to like it. With STEAM it wasn't hatred of STEAM in paticular, but what it represented digitally. Origin isn't hated because it's something new, and radical, and we aren't used to it, it's because it's a poorly run, poorly maintained mess, it's like STEAM's retarded cousin. It's pretty much the second coming of Microsoft's "Games For Windows Live", execept without the excuse that it's a new thing and trying to co-habitate with a console based digital network (sharing gamerscore with XBL and such).
![Fr]anc[is](https://eg-forums-escapist-data.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/data/avatars/l/93/93202.jpg?1620797781){kind=avatar}