Saviordd1 said:
Recently in my ever continuing immigration to PC land from Xboxville I decided I wanted my Mass Effect games on the PC (Mostly so I could download a mod that makes the ending acceptable and so the people playing multiplayer weren't 12 year olds)
Now of course to get Mass Effect 3 I needed to use Origin, now I've had Origin for a while; I played the ME3 demo on it a while back and I tried out Battlefield 2142 on it, besides that I ignored it.
Using it now I have to ask, why is it so horrible exactly?
I mean sure its not the BEST game distribution downloader thing, and I doubt it's sales are nearly as good as Steams but overall its not offensive or horrible. Hell I managed to pick up the ME3 digital blah blah edition for about 40 bucks which isn't all that bad.
Did I miss the memo where Origin raped someones dog or what?
TL;DR
Why is Origin so hated?
Origin is a mess and badly managed.
Let me tell you this following TRUE story:
When ToR was on it's way I was psyched up like a lot of people and ran out and pre-ordered one of the Collector's Editions at Gamestop. I actually waited in line for store opening to get one. I brought it hope and put in my pre-order code on the website and it told me I had a normal edition. After talking to EA and Gamestop it turns out this was a known problem, I went back to Gamestop, got a new code for a CE pre-order printed out, came home to redeem it and found out I couldn't. According to EA there is no way you can overwrite the code for the same product, so the only way to get my CE benefits on my account was to create an entirely new EA/Origin account with a seperate e-mail and register it that way. They told me to do this and they would find a way to condense the service. I did this and basically wound up with TWO Origin accounts, one for my EA games in general, and one specifically for ToR. To play differant things I'd have to login and logout of Origin and make sure I was set up the right way. Tons of fun, right. Needless to say when I got some other products using this gimmick like "Kingdoms of Amalur" I had some trouble with installation getting games stuck on both accounts, leading to my Origin-nessicary games being split up between two seperate accounts. Despite numerous attemps over roughly a year, EA pretty much started ignoring me about condensing this all into one account, and I gave up, and just try to avoid using anything that requires Origin.
So yes, Origin does come close to being a dog rapist. It's horribly constructed (causing the initial problem) and the people running it just don't really give a crap.
The thing to understand is that I'm not the only one who hit that problem with Gamestop pre-order and wound up in a similar position. What's more it seems like more and more people hit some kind of snag like this, which EA does not give a crap about, every single time they release a product. I've also heard people talk about errors where they have had to pretty much create a new origin account for each and every individual video game they play.
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Beyond all that "fun" there is also a matter of principle here involving sheer, unprecedented, greed.
When these services like STEAM got started they had a rocky start and took some selling for people to use, when they took off they became a great way to organize your games, and also offered some deep discounts from time to time to compensate for lack of a physical product. They also presented an avenue for digital distribution, microtransactions, and DLC, and companies like Valve wound up making some serious bank off of it.
Origin, and admittedly a lot of other services, do not exist to be conveinent for customers or provide any real service. They exist because of the companies controlling them want to be able to force you into their market, to pay their prices, and feed you their DLC on their terms. Origin exists because they hope to somehow force users onto it to pay full price for digital EA games, and also take total control of (and the full profit from) microtransactions. which is something EA in paticular leads the pack on.
Origin is simply one of many company-specific services/websites/etc... that have appeared and disappeared all intended for the same basic purpose. Late to the game, money grabbing. Most are doomed to failure because a service carrying only the games of one company can't exactly compete with a more general service when it comes to discounts and such, and what's more they don't want to (big game companies having occasionally decried STEAM sales in paticular as bad). Origin operates on a larger, more noticible, and more obnoxious level than most, being almost entirely unavoidable if you want to use EA games, and showing the usual EA committment to customer service (ie none at all) when it comes to their service infrastructure and dealing with their own problems and mistakes.
In short Origin doesn't really offer any of the perks or benefits that come with STEAM, gamers gate, or any of the other digital distribution platforms out there. Not to mention being highly invasive on systems that run it.
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On a third front, I'll also say that I have slightly more faith in Gabe to stand by gamers in the 11th hour than I do in EA which is all about the money. While EA and Acitivision have fought politicians and such in the past, I remember not too long ago that Biden was talking to people in the industry not only for their take on gaming related to violence, but to gather information on the viability of being able to actually police a ban on violent games. If for some reason Obama does push for a violent game ban, and wins, the first thing they are going to go after are digital distributers, as by knocking them out you can pretty much take violent games away from a lot of people at once. It's much easier than trying to raid houses looking for copies of games and such. At the end of the day EA might make a big stink, but would comply, and take everything with them. Gabe seems more likely to remove the steam nessecity of programs, annouce a closing, and then shut down and wipe his system, allowing people to keep their games bringing it down to individual policing or whatever. I could be wrong here of course, but it's something I've been increasingly thinking about given the turn recent politics have taken. That said I do not think such a nation-wide violent game ban passing is actually likely, and if it did happen, I don't think it would survive a supreme court appeal given what's happened with other attempts to institute wide scale bans. Video games not being in all that much more trouble than Hollywood has gotten into in the past, and it generally fizzles out, even the UK's "Video Nasties" effort in the 1980s ultimatly failed. It's still something to consider though.
