Andre Yoskowitz
30 Jun 2013 12:04
EA has announced it is planning to "re-establish Origin as a service to gamers, not as a means to drive transactions."
Origin, the company's digital game distribution platform, is a rival to Steam and has been available to Windows users since 2011 and Mac users since earlier this year.
"In the near term, quite frankly, our focus is making that download better, making that install better, making that automatic patching better," executive vice president Andrew Wilson said. "Making that friends presence better, making the various game services better. That's what you're going to see from us over the next year, which is really re-establish Origin as a service to gamers, not as a means to drive transactions."
Wilson also confirmed that the company has acknowledged that the service does not necessarily have the greatest of consumer sentiment, following a scandal in which it was discovered that EA's Origin EULA allowed for spying on your personal information, regardless of its relation to the actual program.
"I want to reiterate, it's very important for people to understand that we don't expect that all of a sudden people are going to get up and go 'Oh! Great! We now love Origin!'" Wilson said. "We get it. We understand it," he added. "We have heard, we have made some changes already in terms of how we do things, and we're looking at more changes that we'll talk about over the coming months that really are gamer-focused."
Origin has 40 million users.