EA’s digital retail arm has had an impressive first year. In the second of MCV’s four features looking at the big pillars of EA’s business, Christopher Dring sits down with Origin boss David DeMartini to discuss taking on the mighty Steam
Origin has had a successful first year. But what’s stopping rival publishers from launching their own service? This isn’t easy. We have tried a couple of times to develop this kind of technology. It took us a little longer and was certainly harder than anticipated. So in this iteration I’m glad to say we’ve been successful. It’s completely different to game making. You have to build a unit that knows how to do e-commerce effectively and knows how to have a reliable commerce platform and knows how to deal with friends lists, in-game overlays, cloud saves and stuff that isn’t tied to making games.
Aren’t there too many digital retailers out there as it is? There’s always room for innovation. Customers are smart at picking out
16 July 13th 2012
Gabe Newell said he didn’t think Origin had bettered Steam yet. I would tend to agree. David DeMartini, EA
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whose a ‘me too’ and who is innovating. What happens with the ‘me toos’ is that they don’t have the creative minds to differentiate themselves and they tend not to last in the long run.
You’ve recently offered to list crowd-funded games on Origin for free. Why do that?
Crowd-funding is really popular, and the people on these crowd-funding sites seem to be the hardcore of the hardcore. They’re willing to back these titles with a lot of money. We looked at that and said: “The hardcore sometimes has issues with Origin, but they seem to love these crowd- funded games. Wouldn’t it be a great to offer these games the opportunity to have it published without having to worry about the fee?” That allows them to sell it for a lower price so
that it’s accessible to a wider audience, or it allows them to gain more profitability to invest. It was one of the few things we have done that wasn’t controversial and nobody had anything negative to say about it.
Why is there a negativity towards Origin from the hardcore? I think it’s about change. People forget that nine years ago when Steam launched there was a lot of backlash from the core about having to deal with this Steam thing. ‘What is Steam? Why do I want it? Why do I need this app on my desktop?’ Origin represents a change, and anytime EA does something that’s significant in the industry, it generates a certain reaction. Anytime we move in a direction somebody has already moved in, people ask “Why are they doing that?” Really it’s just to give