At a GamesCom press conference EA’s chief operations officer spoke about his long term vision for the Origin service. The company has not offered any specifics on a large upcoming update but they have talked about how free-to-play titles, sharing for Achievements and social-powered challenges will make the service more attractive to players and will give them a chance to spend more time with it.
Origin also expands to move into the Mac OS, Android OS and integrated more closely with Facebook. Peter Moore also detailed the current state of the service, which has more than 500 titles available from 50 companies and a user base of no less than 21 million users.
It seems like this is a move from EA’s Origin to become more competitive with its main rival Steam, lets face it XFire is the only other alternative (that I know of anyway) and that is hardly a success story. Whether all these updates and tweaks for the Origin service will be enough to pull loyal Steam users away remains to be seen, hopefully Origin can offer something unique that Steam doesn’t have instead of hashing out a bad replica of Steam – something that most people are expecting from EA.
