EA Origin: ‘Our aim is to be a better version of Steam’

EA says it wants its Origin download platform to be a better version of all the other portals on the market.

The firm’s senior VP of global ecommerce David DeMartini has also responded to Valve and Steam boss Gabe Newell’s criticism that Origin has yet to do anything ‘super-well’ – adding that he is delighted that the platform is now ‘part of the conversation.’

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,” he told MCV.

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.

Gabe was quick to point out in the first time he ever spoke about Origin publicly that he didn’t think we’d achieved that yet. I would agree with that – 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.”

On Newell talking about Origin, DeMartini added: If 12 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 12m people have downloaded Origin, we have over 50 partners that have flocked to the service in less than 12 months, and we did over $150m in revenue, which represented 400 per cent 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.”