EA Defends Origin From Hardcore Crowd

[Doom972]

Origin seems to function as intended, but it's just not better at anything. Their lack of sales and saying that sales are bad are a the biggest problem I see. They also lack most of the community features Steam has.

 

[Moonlight Butterfly]

They are lacking in functions but it seems to work fine.

Mostly it annoys me because you can't track achievements from it like with Steam or XBOX live.

 

[The Artificially Prolonged]

Dear EA,

Do you remember in the scene in Rocky where Mickey was yellin' at Rocky for not trying hard enough, and how Rocky countered with saying Apollo was an underdog once too, so just calm down and Rocky will eventually be the champ if he just waits long enough?

No? Good, because that scene never existed because that's never how underdogs become successful. And right now you are so underdog there are paw prints on your forehead.

Being competitive isn't just doing the exact same things the champ did seven years ago. It's forcing the champ to play the game a whole new way.

Sincerely,
A devout Battlefield fan who's really upset about this poorly implemented, half-assed program that's surviving via shear thickheaded executives tagging along throwing money rather than smart business plans and creative strategies.

Exactly. EA can't get away with saying Origin is as good as Steam was a decade ago as it is not 2003 anymore, and they are competing with present day Steam, which is miles ahead. If they want to beat Steam they have to at least match Steam in terms of quality service at first and then find a way to surpass it.

 

[Emiscary]

"You're incorrect in the belief that you don't like or need our digital distribution service."

That about sum up EA's statement? Honest to God I fully expect them to try mass hypnotism at some point in the near future.

 

[Hungry Donner]

Dear EA,

Do you remember in the scene in Rocky where Mickey was yellin' at Rocky for not trying hard enough, and how Rocky countered with saying Apollo was an underdog once too, so just calm down and Rocky will eventually be the champ if he just waits long enough?

No? Good, because that scene never existed because that's never how underdogs become successful. And right now you are so underdog there are paw prints on your forehead.

Being competitive isn't just doing the exact same things the champ did seven years ago. It's forcing the champ to play the game a whole new way.

Sincerely,
A devout Battlefield fan who's really upset about this poorly implemented, half-assed program that's surviving via shear thickheaded executives tagging along throwing money rather than smart business plans and creative strategies.

Exactly. EA can't get away with saying Origin is as good as Steam was a decade ago as it is not 2003 anymore, and they are competing with present day Steam, which is miles ahead. If they want to beat Steam they have to at least match Steam in terms of quality service at first and then find a way to surpass it.

My thoughts exactly.

I don't disagree with DeMartini as I avoided Steam for years. But it feels like they didn't study Steam at all before rolling our Origin. I'm sure that's incorrect, but that just makes it worse since they must have made these mistakes despite closely examining Steam. There's so much about Origin's release that could have been proactive rather than reactive.

 

[Thoric485]

The problem is they think of themselves as Steam 2.0, when in reality they're GFWL 2.0.

 

[I.Muir]

Yadda yadda yadda yadda

Here is the big difference
Valve - steam is loved, respected and produces games of a quality greater than 8 / 10 every bloody time
Floats on it's own and is the go to place for indie games
Pricing is still expensive and by that I mean average but will drop and then goes on sale

EA - Origin is the most hated bureaucratic mess of a company to exist in the gaming world whose games are often mediocre at best and include every bad new trend but somehow worse, often more than one at the same time
In order to market Origin, games are to be forcibly withheld from steam
Pricing will always remain at it's highest for as long as possible

This situation won't change anytime soon either

 

[Zefar]

Steam had many technical difficulties in the beginning, but that's nothing compared to Origin now.

EA go deliberately go out of their way with Origin to take away customer's games just for modding/fan-patching their games and for using common street languange on their forums, that wouldn't even get you a warning here at the Escapist.

It's the difference between simple failure and malice.

PC gamers are not likely to forget terrible treatment like that any time soon, even if EA change such policies.

The conspiracy in this post is sky rocketing. They ain't banning people from their games but it certainly wouldn't hurt. Trolls deserve every punishment they get.

As for "Street language"? You mean like this.

Black guy: Yo nigga, get me some KFC and a melon! I'm hungry!

Because street language ain't always all that welcome on forums. Since you're most likely calling people whore, gay, ****** and asshole just to name a few. Forums got rules to follow. Simple ones at that too. Trolls just fails at these things.

You also have to say some pretty bad things or troll pretty hard on the forum to get banned. But people who don't visit the site often believe everything they hear from haters so not like you're gonna believe someone who's been on the forum.


Also what Technical problems does Origin have now that Steam don't have?

Steam can still stop working for people. Crashing every now and then. Make games Unavailable for an undisclosed time. Or randomly put your account in lock down when buying stuff on their store.

The only real problem I've found with Origin is that it doesn't like Sleep mode. It will bug up after that but all you need to do is restart the program. Which doesn't take long.
Origin is also faster than Steam is at the moment for me. The store, Community all take far to long to load up. On Origin? Goes pretty fast.

 

[Kungfu_Teddybear]

If I didn't need Origin for Mass Effect and Battlefield 3 then I probably wouldn't have it, as others have said, there's just no real reason to use Origin over Steam.

That said, I will say this for Origin: It's a lot more stable than Steam is. Steam runs like crap, it's a great program, I love it and I love Valve, but seriously, it's unstable as fuck. You inexplicably get disconnected quite often, you get errors sometimes just going from the store page to the community page, I got an error message 5 times in a row just trying to add a video to my profile once, hell, lately Steam has had problems signing me in automatically. I've lost track of the number of times I've had an error when it's tried to sign me in automatically when I turn on my PC and I have to end up signing in manually.

Origin on the other hand, is perfectly stable, I've never had any errors while using it, never been disconnected from it for no reason, and for some reason I actually get faster download speeds on it than I do on Steam. Origin is pretty much devoid of anything Steam has, apart from a store and a profile page (that you can't even do anything with) making it shit compared to Steam, but at least it's shit that runs well.

 

[tmande2nd]

Like most of my friends say on a daily basis:
FUCK EA.

I seriously look forward to the day when this blight on gaming crashes.

 

[mattaui]

Let me be honest, nobody with half a brain likes digital distribution even a little bit.

Not exactly true. There's quite a lot of us out there that find Steam (and digital distribution in general) very handy and practical. Physical media on the other hand is far less practical considering the inevitable decay of the medium in question (scratched discs or whatever else) and requiring physical space. Digital distribution on the other hand means that anywhere there's internet, there's access to your entire library. Even if HDDs go tits up or any other calamity strikes, you'll still be able to download what you want when you want it.

Hell, most of those services allow you to make offline backups. Some of them don't even have any kind of DRM, like Good Old Games. It's also highly practical from a customer point of view. In the case of Steam it's one single client containing a games manager, a downright amazing shop with a veritable cornucopia of features including but not limited to demos, wishlists, massive sales and so on and so forth. There's the social network and there's the fairly decent support.

All of this for (often) less money than the physical copy costs and you often get so much more as well. As for control, I have just as much control (and more) of my products as I ever did over any physical copy of games requiring activation of any kind. Which is pretty much all that are released these days.

So yeah, your derogatory little statement up there does not hold very true.

I just wanted to second your comment there about digital distribution being fantastic. I think it's fantastic, and except for the one or two games I buy every year where I might want the worthless crap that comes with the physical CE, I buy all my games through Steam. No discs or boxes to worry with, offline backup and offline play when I want it, access to my entire library from any desktop or laptop and then the entire ecosystem of cloud and community features. And yes, the prices and the sales, they're the added icing on the cake. Then there's GOG, which has saved me from having to dig through storage boxes and fiddle with DOSbox to play old games I liked, all for a few bucks.

 

[Jodah]

Here's the thing. Valve did it first. Everything they did they had to learn from scratch. EA, on the other hand, had half a dozen different DD to learn from. They had the benefit of seeing what did and did not work for other companies. They chose to ignore that advantage.

 

[mattaui]

EA complaining about people not switching to them from Steam is like any other new brand complaining about customers having loyalty to their old brand. It sounds whiny and pathetic. Unless Origin can step up and actually offer something new, rather than a handful of exclusives which does nothing but aggravate most people, they're going to run into problems like this and they won't feel the love from the so-called hardcore crowd. I think that's another telling example of EA's arrogance towards their own customer base. Decide that the only people that don't like you are in some specific group so you can make the dubious distinction that they don't like you, but everyone else does.

Reminds me of the time that Best Buy did a similar thing, with some exec making a statement about certain customers they didn't want or that weren't worth having. That went over about as well as you'd have thought.

 

[SextusMaximus]

People used Origin?

Hahahahahahahahaha

 

[Weaver]

Quite frankly, I don't really care how good Origin is.

EA has fucked me several times in the past, and in my mind they're just "the company that screws me over." I don't use Origin because EA has proven themselves untrustworthy.

 

[Scrustle]

Of course EA would find a way to turn all the hate it gets for Origin in to a way to pat itself on the back for being the most awesome thing in the industry.

 

[Auesis]

"Yeah, but Steam sucked when it started too!" Sounds like a kid in the playground trying to make excuses.

They've had the privilege of nearly a decade of observations over Steam's development. They then go and make the exact same mistakes. Not acceptable.

Not to mention the absolutely horrible service Origin gives anyway, especially the prices. The "sales" they have are absolutely hilarious.

 

[Yeager942]

What a lovely night at the arena folks! With the two fighters on either side of the ring and the round 1 starting, this is looking like its going to be a doozy of match. Barnabas "Old Blackie" Steam, a crowd favorite, is fighting Otto "That Orange Dude" Origin.

Origin, red with jealousy, jolts a jab, boldly berating Steam for devaluing games. Meanwhile, Steam deftly dodges and counters Origin with a sucker punch of cold hard facts! Dazed and confused, Origin throws another another one, but time will tell what Steam's response is.

 

[Falterfire]

I'm reminded of a Calvin and Hobbes line:
"You know how Einstein got bad grades while he was in elementary school? Well mine are EVEN WORSE!"

And anybody who thinks Origin is more stable than Steam hasn't tried to use Origin on a laptop. Every time you wake the laptop up Origin crashes. Every. Freaking. Time.

 

[veloper]

Steam had many technical difficulties in the beginning, but that's nothing compared to Origin now.

EA go deliberately go out of their way with Origin to take away customer's games just for modding/fan-patching their games and for using common street languange on their forums, that wouldn't even get you a warning here at the Escapist.

It's the difference between simple failure and malice.

PC gamers are not likely to forget terrible treatment like that any time soon, even if EA change such policies.

The conspiracy in this post is sky rocketing. They ain't banning people from their games but it certainly wouldn't hurt. Trolls deserve every punishment they get.

As for "Street language"? You mean like this.

Black guy: Yo nigga, get me some KFC and a melon! I'm hungry!

Because street language ain't always all that welcome on forums. Since you're most likely calling people whore, gay, ****** and asshole just to name a few. Forums got rules to follow. Simple ones at that too. Trolls just fails at these things.

You also have to say some pretty bad things or troll pretty hard on the forum to get banned. But people who don't visit the site often believe everything they hear from haters so not like you're gonna believe someone who's been on the forum.


Also what Technical problems does Origin have now that Steam don't have?

Steam can still stop working for people. Crashing every now and then. Make games Unavailable for an undisclosed time. Or randomly put your account in lock down when buying stuff on their store.

The only real problem I've found with Origin is that it doesn't like Sleep mode. It will bug up after that but all you need to do is restart the program. Which doesn't take long.
Origin is also faster than Steam is at the moment for me. The store, Community all take far to long to load up. On Origin? Goes pretty fast.

There is no conspiracy. For anyone who's been following the news in game mags the info is simply out there.
People have been banned losing all of their Origin games for these things.

Even if the posters were all trolls like you claim, the penalty still completely out of proportion. Why would anyone want to defend this practice?