Origin, EA, And Exclusives

Electronic Arts recently announced their new PC release platform Origin. Whether this attempt will stand up and become more prominant than previous attempts like EA Link remains to be seen, but EA's Frank Gibeau has made it clear that they will be pushing the plaform hard by making many of their upcoming (and existing) releases exclusive to Origin.

The first few titles announced to be exclusive to Origin has been Star Wars: The Old Republic, Battlefield 3, and a handful of others. Crysis 2 was recently pulled from sale on Steam in order to secure future exclusivity on the Origin platform, and it's expected that there will be more to come. The odd decision on EA's part seems to be that they are targeting specific franchises for Origin exclusives. According to Gibeau, "It depends on the title and what we're trying to do. In the case of Star Wars, we're trying to build an audience for Origin... And it's also an opportunity for us to better manage the downloads and how we bring people over from the beta and that sort of thing. For a lot of reasons it made sense for an MMO, which is a highly complex deployment."

Much of this is personally reminds me, of the PlayOnline system that Square Enix had deployed for the distribution of their products and management of their MMO. Not to mention, it seems only marginally different than EA's previous proprietary download services. Will Origin prove to be a worthy adversary to the many download sites and services out there, such as the main powerhouse, Steam? Hopefully EA will make a godly system that everyone will flock to, or at least have good failsafes in place so they can transfer everything to a more stable, reliable service.