Origin Sale Takes a Jab at Steam

[NuclearKangaroo]

i really cant understand how the existence of bad games affects your enjoyment of good games

It doesn't, those are your words, not mine.

It does however affect my shopping experience when I have to scroll past piles of steaming garbage when I am looking for a new game. We are discussing the shitty storefront here not what it is selling.

search function

You misunderstand.

I mean looking for "a" game, not a specific one.

A good store is one you can walk into without knowing exactly what you want and just looking around and finding something that you might like, "browsing" is the term, I believe.

If I walk into a bookstore I can walk over to the fantasy section and find at least a decent fantasy book, maybe even a good one. Steam by comparison would stock GRR Martin next to "that story with dragons some teenager wrote for the school paper".

http://store.steampowered.com/tag/en/Fantasy/

are we done?

maybe we have different definitions of what makes a store good, when i think of a good store i usually think of a place where i can get desired goods, hassle free and with a great service

 

[Saltyk]

I do love how the fact that this is Origin and not Steam makes it a bad thing according to the comments. I guarantee that if Steam took a crack at Origin, people would be laughing at Origin in the comments. But EA is "totes teh devils" so Origin is Demon Spawn.

For those questioning Origin taking a potshot at Steam, you must be new to this. Sega had that whole "Genesis does what Nintendon't" campaign and Sony even took shots at Nintendo back with the PS1. I vividly remember ads stating that you couldn't fit Playstation games on a cartridge. Complete with a FF7 screen shot that it claimed the N64 couldn't handle and it was only a part of the game.

And it's not even a thing that only happens in games. Car companies constantly talk about how much better their car is compared to the competition, for example.

Honestly, I don't have a dog in this fight. But keeping some perspective would be nice. Worst case, Origin makes Steam better for virtue of existing. Meaning that you win all the more.

 

[Vigormortis]

So all Valve has to do is offer all of those games at 75% off on top of the hundreds of other games they'll heavily discount? Plus none of the games on Origin are ones I want to play whereas Steam sales offer discounts on games that at least a few people want if not the majority.

It's kind of like:
Over here we have a pizzeria selling any large, one-topping pizza for $9, and over there we have a pizzeria selling only pepperoni pizza for $9.

What EA is doing here is the equivalent of the second pizzeria advertising, "Pepperoni pizza only nine bucks! Who needs those other toppings? Nobody ever eats those."

It's cool and all that they've got a few games on sale for such low prices but a jab at the competitor, when the competitor is handily trouncing you in the same endeavor, is as pathetic as it is scummy.

Even so...

But it is nice that Steam will have some competition that might get them to improve. Although it will be a strange day when I'd rather give money to EA than Valve.

I heartily agree. While I would argue that Steam's had competition for years (and doesn't even have anything even remotely resembling a "monopoly", as so many would like to claim), having better competition is a good thing.

Here's hoping Origin continues to improve.

When a company has to insult another to build itself up, that's pretty must the green light for me to ignore them. Not that I wasn't avoiding EA like the plague anyway, but still...

You should have seen EA's smear campaign against Steam leading up to the launch of Origin.

My god, they left no scum bucket un-flung during that campaign. I've rarely seen a company commit so much hypocrisy and blatant lying in such a short time span - not outside the oil and banking industries, anyway. The EA CEO's even took turns taking personal jabs at Gabe Newell during interviews and press releases.

It was truly pathetic. It was almost as bad as the Sega/Nintendo smear campaigns in the 90's.