What didn't head honcho of Valve, Gabe Newell, talk about on what seems to be an amazing episode of the Seven Day Cooldown podcast? This latest tidbit reveals his thoughts on EA's competing digital distribution platform Origin.
They have a lot of work to do to get to way they want to be and where I as a customer would want them to be. I don’t think they’re doing anything super well yet. They have a bunch of smart people working on it. I think they’re still playing catch up to a lot of people who have been working in the space for a while. I think they’re recognising what the challenges are with building and scaling out this kind of system.
That’s isn’t to say they won’t build stuff in the future that is useful to software developers or gamers but they haven’t done that yet.”
In terms of EA games coming back to Steam, Newell claims he wants their games to return to his platform.
We think their customers would be happy if their games were on Steam. We tell them that on a regular basis. As we learn about this stuff we’re all going to be making things better for other gamers. Tim Sweeney (Epic founder) doesn’t look at Steam and say “Fuck! We shouldn’t support that because that will hurt long term sales of the Unreal Engine.” He’s like, “that’s pretty cool, that’s pretty useful.” So hopefully EA get their head to the same place.”
However that seems unlikely, EA reported that Origin had amassed more than nine million users back in February, and churned out more that $100 million in revenue. Gabe will open his door, but EA probably won't walk through it.
Have you warmed up to Origin over the past few months?
By Stephen Heller - Tweet @Heller_MMGN