EA: “Origin will be a better version of Steam”

EA’s digital distribution platform, Origin, has had a somewhat mixed reception since release. Taking a controversial business model of forcing the service on buyers of big EA titles, the service was unpopular with gamers, a problem compounded by its limited functionality and multiple issues.

Now EA have their sights set on a bigger target – they want Origin to be better than current download king-of-the-hill, Steam.

EA SVP of global commerce, David DeMartini said Origin is “on a path of constant improvement.”

“There are better mousetraps that ultimately get built out of this innovation and the only way you get to the innovation is to have other people try and do a better version of what someone has previously done. And that’s what we’re attempting to do on Origin,” said DeMartini.

“If MySpace had stayed the one answer in social networking and no one switched to Facebook, then we’d all be stuck on MySpace right now and we wouldn’t have had the Facebook phenomenon.”

“We’re on a path of constant improvement. I didn’t expect to be able to out-feature Steam within the first 12 months. But I’m quite optimistic we will differentiate ourselves as a service. We’ve built the foundation and now we are starting to add value to the service off of that foundation.”

Demartini is pretty chuffed with the progress Origin has made so far, and they do have admittedly impressive numbers for such a short space of time.

“If twelve months ago you would tell me we’d be in the conversation, I would have been pretty happy. And when you look at the fact that over 12 million people have downloaded Origin, we have over fifty partners that have flocked to the service in less than twelve months, and we did over $150 million in revenue, which represented 400 percent growth over the previous year – those numbers show we are making huge progress.”

“EA is in a really interesting place. We have this bar that is set so high, so that whether it is any of our games or services, we want to be 90 plus Metacritic at everything. Origin is moving in that direction. We are not there yet. We understand that. But we are going to get there soon.”