EA’s digital download service, Origin, has taken a lot of heat since its release for some of its business decisions, which appeared less than scrupulous.
Most noticable of these was its decision to pull their games from Steam, citing a reason which seemed somewhat suspicious, since it wasn’t “we don’t like competition”.
The decision seems to have paid off however, as EA has announced that the service has now hit over 4 million installations, an impressive number considering the short time it has been available. While the platform was initially launched to deliver EA content, EA CFO Eric Brown has now said “we’ll be delivering third-party content to Origin very soon”.
Brown goes on to note their plans to “leverage our backend infrastructure – the 130 million-plus registered users that we have, the multitude of digital payment methods, et cetera.” He did not however mention which third-party groups would be allowed to distribute on Origin at this time.
4 million is certainly an impressive number, and it would seem that digital distribution is going to become a hotly contested market extremely soon. This is certain to displease Valve, as Steam has had a stranglehold on the market for quite some time. Now that EA has tied blockbuster Battlefield 3 to Origin however, there will most likely be a big spike in downloads of the service very soon.
A lot is on the line for EA this holiday season, and Battlefield 3 certainly has a lot of pressure on it – to steal market share from both Call of Duty and Steam.
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