Origin versus steam, the battle for the gaming sandbox - Page 3
A welcome carryover from Steam to Origin is the portability of your gaming titles. Finally you can play your favorite game on any pc so long as you have registered it with your Origin account. I'm hopeful this signals a new paradigm where copy protection follows the user instead of the hardware. To its credit EA was one of the first publishers to allow multiple installs in most of its recent EULAs.
I'm glad to see the Steam model adopted as a natural progression of that. Perhaps this signals the end of treating every customer as a thief instead of a valued asset.
To be fair, Origin is still a Beta product which involves seemingly never ending updates and a less polished interface. I have to wonder if it was wise to pull an entire library off of a relatively stable delivery platform in favor of a more questionable one.
Origin makes the purchase of games convenient much like Steam but since it's a walled garden where only EA can play, there's not much room for competition. I think until something changes EA will find itself activating its games from other sources like Amazon and Newegg more than via its portal which calls Origin's existence into question.
I was hesitant to install Origin because EA's past includes a history of invasive copy protection schemes, spotty server reliability and abandonment of older titles.
Steam is a mature platform and the jury is still out on Origin. If you like EA titles you're going to be stuck with it unless you don't install Origin which in the case of Battlefield 3 is not really an option. Right now I prefer Steam but I'm glad to at least have access to my EA titles on Origin.
One more note. As of this writing Steam has released a statement concerning recent compromise of their servers. While it's unlikely that the intruders will be able to use any information gleaned I'd still advise a password change or your Steam credentials.
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