While in the past Valve’s Gabe Newell has been quite charitable in his comments towards EA’s Origin, it would appear that the gloves are off.
Speaking candidly, the man at the helm of Origin’s biggest competitor, Steam, clearly doesn’t think much at all of EA’s service – at least not for now.
“They have a lot of work to do to get to where they need to be and where I as a customer would want them to be,” he said.
When asked what he thought Origin was doing well, there was an awkward, “Err, Err…” before Gabe elaborated.
“I don’t want to dodge the question – I don’t think they’re doing anything super-well yet.
“They have a bunch of smart people working on it but I think they’re still playing catch up to a lot of people who have been working in the space for a while. I think they’re recognising what the challenges are with building and scaling out this kind of system.
“That’s not to say they won’t build stuff in the future that is useful to software developers or to gamers but they haven’t done that yet.”
Newell also spoke about EA pulling their titles from the Steam service, and whether or not the Origin-exclusive titles will be showing up on Steam anytime soon. Valve is trying, but it looks like we shouldn’t hold our breath.
“We’d love to have their games on Steam,” he explained. “We think their customers would be happy if their games were on Steam. We tell them that on a regular basis.
“I think EA wants to take their shot at building their own alternative to Steam, and if they’re successful at that and their customers like that then that’s great.
The Valve boss added that the focus should be on the best possible experience for the gamer.
“As we learn about this stuff we’re all going to be making things better for other gamers. Tim Sweeney doesn’t look at Steam and say ‘F***, we shouldn’t support that because that will hurt long term sales of the Unreal Engine’. He’s like, “that’s pretty cool, that’s pretty useful”.
“So hopefully EA get their head to the same place.”
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Origin is a blight on the gaming market.
This Pre-alpha release of a system which is REQUIRED to play many of our beloved titles is a serious miss-step by EA.
It has forced many, including myself, to piracy.
Yaarrrrrrrrrrr