VALVe on the other hand, have proved time and time again they care. I won’t specify how, since it won’t take much individual research to find examples. VALVe & Steam win every time over EA & Origin in my mind.

As far as people commenting on Origin’s download speeds, myself and many of my friends have noticed it blatantly lies, we were getting speeds of 13-20mbps. That’s ludicrous, we never have and will never be able to obtain those speeds on our current plans. The infrastructure for West Sydney is not *that* good.

A lot of the stuff I’ve gotten through steam has been while it’s on sale. I’ve had spare money at the end of week and there has been a sale, they’ve scammed a fair bit of my cash that way.

Bandwith isn’t a selling point for me, my cash going as far as it can is.

Even if they do roll something out to make consumers take note, they still need to have a wide selection of games to choose from otherwise it will all be in vain…

Origin could eventually get that, but most people don’t want to run 2-3 services that all do the same thing.

Speaking of which, when was the last time I used Xfire…

yurtles:
Hold on. Did Tim Colwill just refer to himself in the third person in the summary?

All the summaries refer to people in the third person!

But yes, he did. :P

As for speed, Origin was fast but lied as it uses a compression technology to speed up the transfer, but claims that you get increased speed, however this is not the case you still only download at max speed of your connection and the file is temporarily reduced in size.

However on the flip side I max out my connection in Steam too (8MB ADSL 1 extended getting an avg of 800-900Kbit/s) so speed wise I see no difference. Steam is also tried and tested, with better security than Origin and less of an ego for the guy running it.

Unless they are willing to throw lots of funding at Origin, to develop all the features that Steam currently has + more and address the shortfalls of Steam, they’ll never catch up.

I think it’s pretty showing of the difference in company cultures. Valve is privately funded and focussed entirely on providing a good customer experience and hiring and retaining clever people.

EA is still following 20th century business models and trying to compete, and I don’t think it will ever work until they have a massive culture shift.

Because having to start AND join a multiplayergame AND spawn in it, before you’re even able to adjust your controls/graphic settings is fun, isn’t it?

That, among other things left me kinda preoccupied about origin.

Neg, that’s measured with independent bandwidth monitors. Origin has always maxed my connection out for downloaded. I rarely see Steam do the same anymore. But like I said, that could well be due to the fact that Steam has far more users.

There are games I do buy full price and by that I mean $50 tops but the company has to make me want it.

Don’t make it hard for me, don’t have artificially high prices and I’ll go buy your product.

But if Steam is a Monopoly, it’s a very consumer friendly monopoly probably due in part to Valve being a private business where they don’t have to bow down to the demands of ever greater profits for the shareholders.

I for one, welcome cheap games, I don’t mind paying full price for a game that I know I am going to play the hell out of like Skyrim, but other games like Crysis 2 where I was always on the edge… I’ll buy it when it is cheap. (Like I did, thanks Steam!)

Plus, ever tried getting a refund out of EA because their games don’t work? Took a complaint to the ACCC to get them to do it for me, even then it took months and I even had their tech support call me some horrible names.
They even pointed me to the Eula stating they don’t provide refunds and I in turn pointed them to Australian law.

I for one, will not use Origin, Steam or Retail+No Origin or it’s no sale.

vencha88:
Yo Homeboy this is a really well written article. Changed my mind on a few things and cemented other thoughts. Bravo Sir.

Thanks man!

agentdark:
There is one thing that Origin offers that blows Steam away – reliable bandwidth.Every thing I’ve downloaded from Origin (Mass Effect and BF3 clients/patches) have downloaded full speed every time.It’s anyone’s guess what download speed Steam will give me.Maybe that’s a side effect of the size of the userbase, but it’s still a definite plus in favour of Origin.Even if it’s the only plus…

I actually don’t mind Steam, because Internode mirrors all Steam content. For me, my download region is “NSW (Internode)”. Since I’m with internode that means non metered content downloaded as fast as my connection would allow.

bf3 – i cant his play button in origin. again i get a bf3.exe at 600odd kb and nothing happens. (i can get the game running if i go directly to battlog webpage).

ive uninstalled origin and the games… a number of times. ive got all my drivers up todate… it just refuses to work. i need to format my pc and try that as a last resort but needless to say its not something i want to do.

it REALLY annoys me.

That’s because nobody uses Origin :>

http://img407.imageshack.us/img407/5794/dddownload.jpg

phx: I can go one better! Everything I have downloaded from Origin has downloaded at close to double the actual bandwidth of my DSL.

So more likely the Origin client is just BSing you.

I don’t think so – Battlefield 3 downloaded for me in 20 minutes, it’s pretty hard for the client to lie about that. I have a 100mbit Telstra Cable connection, and it maxed it out for the entire trip.

Since EA take up a big chunk of a Datacentre in Sydney, I dare say that’s where Origin is getting its superior bandwidth from.

I like Steam a lot but Origin has been, without a doubt, a much faster download every time. Steam has gotten a lot better as of late though, but they still fail to consistently prioritize local connections (even when they are on the same network as the customer’s ISP).