You ever feel like Origin is Steams' lil brother that was bashed in the head with a brick?

[Andrew_C]

People seem to forget that Steam was not always the smoothly oiled machine it is today. For several years It was a steaming pile of shit that seemed specifically designed to screw up your computer and make playing Counter Strike and Half Life 2 as frustrating an experience as possible. There is a good reason why there are people who still today refuse to buy any game that uses Steam.

Compared to today's Steam client, Origin seems poorly implemented and lacking in features but it's not actually broken. Valve have had 10 years to perfect Steam and Origin is a hell of a lot better that the original Steam client (thank god). Let's put it this way, if I had to choose between having GFWL or original Steam on my machine, I'd choose GFWL.

You can log into Origin WITHOUT an Internet connection and any games that are already installed will boot and run just fine.

You can do that with Steam.

Actually, for a long time you couldn't do that reliably with Steam, it still doesn't work properly for many people and you still have to run the game while online first. In my case Steam recently spent 5 minutes (I timed it) looking for an Internet connection on startup before giving up and asking if I wanted to restart in offline mode. It's no wonder people think Steam's offline mode doesn't work.

 

[upgrayedd]

I remember using Origin when it first came out. The damn thing was so buggy and broken i feared for putting my credit details in it.

In all, Darksiders 2 was on Origin for 59 dollars while Steam had it for 10. Thats why i use Steam. Better deals, More users. Much bigger selection in games.

 

[Longstreet]

The ONLY reason for origin to exists is because you need it to run EA titles.

If ea titles were still available on steam (or well, the new ones) the user base of origin would be much smaller.
Also, how much does it really offer outside ea titles? (never looked at the online store)

 

[AT God]

First off, you said Steam gave you the money back for a game that went on sale shortly after you bought it? I tried that once and they said no.

Second and more importantly, Origin isn't a baby steam, it is to steam what the devil is to God. Steam supports open platform gaming, even having integrated their own mod delivery system into the service, as well as hosting mods that can be downloaded using Steam's servers.

Origin on the other hand, is the evil side of Steam, the one thing we have always feared Steam would become. Origin doesn't allow freedom with your games, it prohibits modding. Also I don't like how exclusionary it is. With Ubisoft's uPlay thing, at least I can still purchase their games on Steam. I have to put up with their stupid installer and launcher but at least I can know that my credit card information is in Valve's hands and not Ubisoft's. If EA would allow their games to be purchased through Steam, even if I had to use Origin to launch them, I wouldn't be so upset. But having to give my credit card to an inferior version of Steam just to play the rapidly dieing Battlefield series is too much.

I am looking forward to playing Crysis 3, but I will have to keep looking if it stays on Origin at an unreasonable price. I only bought the original Crysis and Crysis 2 because it was on steam for like 10 bucks.


There is an interesting and disturbing trend happening on Steam. There was a steam group that scouted deals across the internet and would post them, regardless of what platform they were for. While I don't know what happened, the group went away for a few weeks and when it returned it had to promise not to post deals on Origin games. This makes me fear Steam might be nervous about Origin's influence, so much as to limit the free speech of a steam group.

The group in quesion however is a lot more complex than I know, so they might have some deal with Valve, but it still gave me cause for alarm.

 

[TheDrunkNinja]

What if you hate them both equally?

"No, I bought these PC games on hard disk for a goddamn reason, what the fuck do you mean I have to download and install fucking Steam to play them?!"

 

[Baneat]

Strictly speaking I think the actual software and its overlay is far better than steam's. But EA have a limited range of software that i have any interest in and shitty business practices so I've only ever used Origin for the Crysis series.