Eleven New Third-Party Publishers Will Be Added To Origin
Eleven new publishers will be making games available to Electronic Arts Origin service, it was announced today. Trion Worlds, Robot Entertainment, CD Projekt RED, Freebird Games, Recoil Games, Autumn Games, 1C Company, inXile Entertainment, Paradox Interactive, Core Learning Ltd., and N3V Games will all start selling games in the “coming months”.
Steam is Origin’s biggest competitor, and by many estimates is absolutely the industry leader in digital distribution of games and DLC. EA, however, has been trying to level the playing field a little bit as they’ve been making some of their recent games require using the Origin service, forcing users to forgo using Steam. These deals reached should only help EA in their endeavor to compete with Steam.
But will this actually affect Steam’s fan base? I would guess that for the moment, Steam doesn’t have much to worry about. Many people use Steam because of the simplicity it provides, not only in purchasing and downloading new content, but also in the way it connects other people. Steam has a following and reputation that at the moment, it just cannot be beat. Origin just plain does not have that reputation. It doesn’t mean, though, that there can’t be more than one successful digital distribution service. This might be the thing that gets the ball rolling for EA.
