Origin versus steam, the battle for the gaming sandbox
I'm not usually an early adopter of any game but with the Release of Battlefield 3 and Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 it was an obvious opportunity for a comparison between Valve's Steam and EA's Origin.
In recent months EA has decided to host its own Origin gaming portal for its games eschewing Valve's Steam client. Whether it's bad blood between companies or just EA's desire to tightly control it IP assets it's obvious that anything with an EA logo is going to be handled by Origin.
I have a decent cache of recent game titles which until recently could be serviced by steam just by entering the installation code using the "Activate game on Steam" option. As a test I attempted to activate a number of EA titles on Steam the other day and found every code rejected. At present the only EA game that still exists on Steam in my "Library" is the recent Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit. I could not activate my codes from Need for Speed : Shift or Shift2 nor could I activate Burnout Paradise.
When I attempted to activate Burnout Paradise on Origin, however, it showed up as a game I could install.
So as it stands now if you want to have a "Steam" like experience with an EA game, apparently you have to use the Origin client.
So what does this mean for the average gamer? Probably little more than an inconvenience, truth be told. I've grown to appreciate the maturity of the steam platform and it's numerous improvements.
For example; Steam would always let you play a game in your library while updates were active but only recently would it allow those downloads to continue while you played your game. There's an area in the Steam client portal where you can monitor such downloads and can start, stop, resume or cancel them.
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