EA's Origin

[SnakeCharmer]

That's a terrible baby neckbeard.

[tgr]

I was just given this link regarding EA's origin and the collection of data that it does:

http://bf3blog.com/2011/08/origin-license-agreement-gives-ea-right-to-collect-and-share-your-data/

Out of curiosity (and because I'm a bit lazy at the moment), how does this compare to Steam? I know steam collects some data on hardware and OS etc.

[jakonovski]

I'm pretty sure EA will hawk my details to the sleaziest marketing firm it can find, while Valve seems a bit more trustworthy. Probably both just as bad, but that's the power of PR for you.

[tmp]

At the very brief glance it seems very similar with the warden thing Blizzard installs with WoW.

[luckton]

Necroing to say that everyone who signed up for Origin no longer have the power to class action sue or jury trial EA.

 

[UnSub]

The question is: would that clause be accepted by a judge as binding?

[rattran]

Supreme's said it would, so for now it seems likely. I'll miss playing Origin exclusive games, but fuck EA for this bullshit.

[tgr]

I just saw that my BC2 account has been turned into an origin account. I guess I can't sue EA now. :(

[Lantyssa]

You didn't agree to their terms though.

[Xanthippe]

I just installed the Sims3 on my new computer, and the Sims Medieval, and now Origin wants to install. I don't want Origin to install.

I fucking hate EA.

[caladein]

Origin wants to install because it's the EADM.  If you don't want it, uninstall whatever old version of it that TS3 installed and just patch the game manually.

[eldaec]

The question is: would that clause be accepted by a judge as binding?

Certainly wouldn't be in the UK.

[luckton]

Microsoft's EA's Peter Moore: Origin is no different now than when Steam was this old.

"If you go back and dust off the transcripts of when Steam first came out, it had the same reaction," Moore told me during an interview at an EA Showcase in New York City. "People didn't like it. You were obligated." [Note from Stephen: here's a 2004 Steam Sucks thread. And here's another.]

But Valve boss Gabe Newell made sure his crew kept improving it. "They provided, over the years—to Gabe and the team's credit—value to the gamer. Those first 12 months were very rocky."

Origin is less than a year old. It's mandatory to play Battlefield 3 and encouraged for Star Wars: The Old Republic. Four out of 10 players of The Old Republic use it. Origin lets you chat with friends but has no message boards. It mostly just sells games. It's got 9.5 million registered users, as of last week, who have spent some $100 million on in-store transactions.

And it exists why?

"We felt the PC business was having a little bit of a renaissance," Moore told me, "and we felt great opportunity with both Star Wars and Battlefield. Mass Effect to come. That this was the time to build out a true platform."

[Furiously]

I think he means monopoly where you can't resale what you own.

[Xuri]

This just in: Six out of 10 The Old Republic players avoid using Origin!

[shiznitz]

The excuse that Steam sucked when it was launched so it is ok for Origin to suck is all kinds of fucked up. 

1) Valve was breaking new ground and high speed internet was just starting.
2) Valve was a game company.  EA is a multi-billion dollar distributior, publisher and designer.
3) EA can look at Steam and how it was launched to see what worked and what didn't and then - OMFG revelation! - avoid the bad and adopt the good.

How many game downloading interfaces are there out there now? For EA to launch such a crappy product is just par for the course, but certainly not excusable.

[HaemishM]

Fuck Origin in its earhole. I only use it when I have to. I still have been unable to patch (and thus can't play) my version of Battlefield 3 on my work PC despite having completely removed it multiple times, gone through an hour with their online chat, removed all my firewall and AV software and had my sysadmin open the specificed UDP ports. It's slow, ugly and is almost nothing like Steam. With EA's money, they have no excuses for a product this badly built and supported.

[Kageru]

He misses the big point anyway. It's not a technical argument. It's that if one company is going to end up being a major force in online PC game retail you want to trust that they won't screw over customers or competitors in favor of their own interests.

It's a question of trust.

[Tebonas]

So EA is competing with the Steam of 10 years ago?

[tgr]

Heh. EA is precisely the single most important reason I will probably never, ever, touch Origin.

[TripleDES]

Worst thing is, EA games require Origin to be installed. I thought I was clever by stuffing it into a VM and mount a SMB share of my games folder into it, to use as install target, and then just manually create the shortcuts on the host machine. Doesn't work. 

[waffel]

Origin hate is the new butthurt gamer bandwagon/circlejerk.

I find it positively awesome that EA doesn't back down from it and continues to release games through Origin. The amount of forum/reddit bitching over Origin and EA is truly comical, yet EA happily skips to the bank with fat stacks.

Give it a few years (no, origin isn't going to go away) and their distribution service will have a nice collection of games and other features... and gamers will gradually accept it.

Just like Steam.

[tgr]

Yes, I'm sure that everyone that's saying "I won't use Origin" are just butthurt gamers bandwagoning/circlejerking. There certainly can't be any underlying reasons beyond that.

[Paelos]

Origin hate is the new butthurt gamer bandwagon/circlejerk.

It's possible, but they came right out of the bag with a terrible EULA that claimed they were going to sell your info, specs, and habits. Then they softened it. Given that EA customer service has been a bit of an issue, this rubs people the wrong way.

Also, let's compare Steam's and Origin's terms of service currently. One makes me feel at least somewhat concerned, and one doesn't. Guess which one!

Origin - EA may terminate access to any  online or mobile products and/or EA Services (and/or any portion thereof) at any time by giving you notice of such termination within the time period specified when you joined the particular EA Service, or if no time period for notice of termination was specified, then within thirty (30) days of the date such notice is either (at EA’s discretion) provided to you via email or is posted on the applicable product or EA Service or on http://www.ea.com/2/service-updates.

Steam -  In the case of a one-time purchase of a product license (e.g., purchase of a single game) from Valve, Valve may choose to terminate or cancel your Subscription in its entirety or may terminate or cancel only a portion of the Subscription (e.g., access to the software via Steam) and Valve may, but is not obligated to, provide access (for a limited period of time) to the download of a stand-alone version of the software and content associated with such one-time purchase

[luckton]

Let's not also forget that EA copy/pasted Sony's addition to their EULA, stating that if your info gets 'mishandled' (either through Black Hat hacks or numb-skull net-admins being lazy), you can't sue them 

[Kageru]

Give it a few years (no, origin isn't going to go away) and their distribution service will have a nice collection of games and other features... and gamers will gradually accept it.

It will most likely end up being the EA on-line store for EA games, much like the Blizzard store and both will rise or fail with the success of those studios.

Meanwhile Steam will probably the be one expanding faster and widening the pool of available PC games.

[koro]

Give it a few years (no, origin isn't going to go away) and their distribution service will have a nice collection of games and other features... and gamers will gradually accept it.

Okay, what is EA going to do with Origin in the next two years that they've failed to do in the past seven or eight when the service was the EA Download Manager and when it was EA Downloader before that, and EA Link before that, and likely a half-dozen other names for the exact same service? Because aside from some social networking features that nobody uses, it's the same damn thing only with a different name. Games required the EA Downloader to run long before Origin came out and nobody willingly used it then, so why should people suddenly start using it now? Sure, they could just go all-out and make every EA-branded PC game require Origin to run (instead of the handful of games that require it now), but that's just as likely to drive people away from the platform as it is to bring people in. "Kicking and screaming" is not the way you want your customers to begin using your platform, because they're not gonna stay.

Even if Origin were this fresh brand-new never-before-seen-from-EA service, why should anyone give them two years to stop sucking? "Because Steam sucked when it launched" isn't an excuse and Peter Moore should be punched in the nuts for using it. Steam launched almost a decade ago to no competition and a radically different economic environment; they're competing with the Steam of 2012, not 2003.

[caladein]

If a game is the same price on Origin as it is on Steam (or GOG for that matter), I'm not picking it up on Origin.  Those two services add some value on top of just delivering bits to me.

But the EADM over the past few years has done a fine job of doing the primary job of a digital distribution service, getting me my game and getting out of the way.  And that puts it well above the "massive discount only zone" of a D2D/GameFly or Impulse or a retail box.

More power to you if you take issue with its Terms or EA's corporate policy, but the software's been fine for some time.  (Disclaimer that I apparently have some of the best luck in the world in getting DD services to behave, going back to ye olde Steam.)

[tgr]

What's wrong with Impulse, apart from the fact it's been bought by gamestop?

[Ingmar]

What's wrong with Impulse, apart from the fact it's been bought by gamestop?

Isn't that enough?

[Velorath]

Let's not also forget that EA copy/pasted Sony's addition to their EULA, stating that if your info gets 'mishandled' (either through Black Hat hacks or numb-skull net-admins being lazy), you can't sue them 

If it makes you feel any better, you never would have gotten anything from suing them anyway.  I don't think anybody made any money when PSN got hacked and that was about as poor a handling of personal information as you can get.

[luckton]

What's wrong with Impulse, apart from the fact it's been bought by gamestop?

Isn't that enough?

It's enough for me, yeah.   

[caladein]

I haven't used it for a lot of games (or recently), but I had some issues with patching and expansion installations.  EU3 specifically for the latter. And the storefront kind of sucked to browse in-client.

In its defense, I was able to play Positech stuff like Democracy 2 completely without incident.

[ffc]

[luckton]

What EA is doing with your information via Origin: Auto-adding titles you already purchased through other digital-distros.

I don't know how  I feel about this.  It's a nice feature, I suppose.  But if they're scanning my files to find out what software I've owned before, what else are they scanning for?

Post edit: Obligatory