News EA partners with Valve to bring its games back to Steam

Presumably you'll need to link your Origin ID with your Steam ID if you already have Origin Access subscription?

 

Not really surprising given the recent "leaks".

 

Good though in that it should mean I can use the steam link to launch origin games (more easily than the current method at least!)

 

Great, you made it worse. Now you're forcing two shopfront programs to pointlessly load before launching the .exe I actually want to run. A step backwards rather than forwards.

 

For installation only.

 

It still starts the Origin crapware in the background for the .exe to actually run.

 

Eh.

Origin isn't the worst distribution platform. They're all kind of ****, one way or another, I think Steam is just Stockholm-Syndroming us.

 

Steam got in first and had all it's really bad problems 15 years ago. It's like the old smelly dog that ripped your house up as a puppy and just stinks the place up now, but you love it anyway because you can't remember life without the damn thing following you around.

 

Exactly. Steam is just the older platform. It still took a long time for it to add features that were really painfully obviously missing, it really got on my tits at the time that Steam never seemed to be even dimly aware of customer wants and needs. Specifically talking about download rate limiting, scheduling, and the like. I'm lucky, Steam now pretty much fulfills my requirements, but I doubt that's the case for every Steam user.

I'm also perpetually ****ed off by Steam's insistence (Although they're not alone with this. Looking at you Blizzard.) on using their own shitbox app for MFA. Just implement support for Yubikey or something for gods sake. It's not like the app is a money generator and without it the Steam house of cards falls down.

Although, the same goes for Blizzard. I know there are workarounds to get a physical token working, but for the life of me I can't understand why a third party MFA isn't just supported.

 

Collecting data seems to be the answer.

 

Which, sadly, doesn't make me like it any more than I already do.

 

Yeah... Five launchers, each with their own MFA app, that's a lot of data collection.

 

As an automated patch downloader they are all equal.

As a store however, Steam is still the best as it is the only one that allows users to warn other users about problems with games on the store page.

That being said, EA and Ubisoft really need to get their sh*t together, if I buy one of their games on Steam, Epic etc then I should never have to suffer through the uplay / origin password recovery and login.

 

After a long period of not using Origin, I tried to recover my account last year. Did all that was asked, absolutely no response, tried emailing, same again. EA can stick Origin right up where the sun doesn't shine.

 

True - But Steam has had a lot longer to develop these features. They weren't there from day dot either. Hell, I remember the first time I used Steam. It wasn't the experience Steam is now, I'd liken it more to other platforms that are still, comparatively, in their infancy.

Don't get me wrong, I don't really like any of them, I think they're all kind of ****. Steam is just less ****, by comparison.

 

Origin and Uplay have been around for almost a decade, neither one has taken a single step towards getting rid of the inconvenience that is double stacked account based drm.

 

For EA at least that's only half true, Origin launched in 2011, but it wasn't their first try at a download store.

They put out the EA Downloader in 2005, it was an attempt at a Steam clone and it was so awful they abandoned it after a year. Then they had EA Link from mid 2006, which was EA Dowaloader in a dress and was just as unusable (I never got to play BF2142: Northern Strike because of it's inability to let me download or verify my purchase, never got my money back either). Then they re-launched it as EA Download Manager for a few months before re-naming it again to the The EA Store, which they kind of half arsed about with until they launched Origin as an all new platform. In true EA fashion purchases from the previous stores did not universally carry over to each other or Origin.

So EA's been at this lark almost as long as Valve, but they suck at it because they're EA.

 

And steam is approaching it's second decade - having come out in 2003.

I'm not saying origin is good, nor the Ubisoft pile, they're all ****. Steam has the dubious honour of being less ****, but only because of features introduced in the last five years. Possibly even more recently, I can't remember when scheduling was added.

EA have definitely been at it a long time - but EA takes three or four times as long as other companies to learn anything. Partly because they keep chopping and changing things with seemingly no consideration as to what the outcome might be.

Honestly, imo, **** 'em all. I'd take DVDs and blu rays over the digital distribution platforms we have available to us.

 

I am interested to see how the sub system will work through Steam but I doubt I will use it. I’ve got my fingers crossed they will serve non-subscription games at some point. I’ve got cash waiting EA! I haven’t played any Battlefield games since they left Steam!