EA To Rebrand Its Origin Platform As It Bows Out Of The PC Gaming Platform Wars

from the white-flag dept

It has been a long and largely fruitless road for Origin, EA's PC gaming client that it had planned on building into a rival of Valve's Steam. What was originally supposed to have been the chief antagonist to Steam in the ongoing PC gaming platform wars instead is best described as a failure to launch. Released in 2011, Origin began life as it lived in total: the walled garden for most EA games. Critics appeared almost immediately, stemming from odious requirements to relinquish personal information, the use of DRM, and security flaws. Couple that with a game library that was relatively stilted compared with Steam, by design mind you, and it's not difficult to understand why the adoption numbers for the game client just never took off.

Several weeks ago, to the surprise of many, EA suddenly released its gaming catalog on Steam. Given the long history of the company keeping its toys for itself, it left many scratching their heads in confusion. This week, the inevitable occurred, with EA announcing that Origin will be no more. Instead, the PC gaming client will rebrand, rebuild, and become an optional place for EA gamers to play, rather than a Fort Knox for EA games.

EA has yet another piece of interconnected news to share: it's rebranding its Origin desktop app to simply be called the EA desktop app, alongside giving its PC platform a visual refresh.

Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz, EA SVP, strategic growth Mike Blank says the overhaul is intended "to create a more frictionless, fast, socially-oriented experience for our players, where it becomes the best place for them to connect with the people they want to play with in the games they want to play."

I'm frankly not used to giving EA a ton of kudos in these pages, but the overall strategy is a good one. The company appears to have finally realized that being permissive with gamers that just want to play the company's games is better business than trying to lock them into a failed client few want to use. The revamping of the UX was long needed, too, but the real star of the show here is that EA is looking to be more open in general.

"All of that is signaled by creating a common and consistent brand that is centered around EA and what EA stands for," Blank says. "And what signals it is this inflection about how EA stands for bringing your players together around the games they want to play on the platforms they want to play on. So yeah, it's not just a name change. It really signals an ethos that is critically important to us and that we know that's important to our players.

It's been a long journey for EA in this regard to where our games show up and where they don't. One of the things that we value is democratizing gaming, which is: how do you enable more people to play? And how do you make it easy for them to do so? And by bringing our games to Steam, we are doing just that. So whether we were there in the past or not, I look towards the future. And what I think today is that we are stronger and healthier. And I think we're responding more effectively to the needs of our players today than we ever have, and Steam is part of that journey."

Again, this is EA we're talking about, so it's going to take more than just the right words to convince most of us that this truly is a new direction for the company. Still, these are the right words. EA has long built a reputation for itself as being anti-consumer in many ways, but all of those ways come down to one thing: control. For a company with that history to suddenly start giving up that control, not out of surrender but out of a belief that it's good business, is a positive step.

Filed Under: origin, pc games, steam, video games
Companies: ea

EA/Origin/Something Locks Benchmarkers Out Of Battlefield Hardline After Too Many GPU Swaps

from the punishing-the-innocent dept

Origin, Electronic Arts' online store and license-check-in system is a hilarious study in how to build a platform to serve legitimate customers and identify infringing copies of the game that both inhibits legitimate customers and misidentifies what is an infringing copy of a game. Add to this the fact that the Origin platform has in the past been found to be in and of itself a massive security exploit and one wonders how the service is still around today. But around it most certainly is, and still screwing with legitimate customers, too, as a group attempting to run benchmark tests on EA's Battlefield Hardline found out.

Guru 3D writer Hilbert Hagedoorn has discovered some pernicious DRM in Battlefield Hardline while attempting to do a "VGA graphics performance" test with the game for a feature article (thanks Blue's News). Apparently the DRM monitors hardware changes - something Hagedoorn was doing a lot of when testing different cards with the game - and when it hits a certain threshold it locks the user out of the game.

"Here's what EAs DRM is doing," Hagedoorn writes. "They don't just verify the number of PCs you work on slash use, nope .. they dare to monitor hardware changes now, which I am sure is a privacy breach on many levels. So once we insert new hardware (graphics cards) the hardware id # hash changes and if that happens a couple of times they are rendering your activation invalid."

For the record, EA has already responded to Game Politics with a wonderfully silly answer: it ain't our DRM, it's the Origin DRM, yo!

"Origin authentication allows players to install a game on up to five different PCs every 24 hours," the EA spokesperson told us this morning. "Players looking to benchmark more than five hardware configurations in one 24 hour period can contact our Customer Support team who can help."

Hoo-boy, EA, that's quite a trip of a rebuttal, considering Origin is your platform and the check-in system you're describing is in fact a form of DRM. So a statement that essentially boils down to, "It wasn't our game DRM, it was our platform DRM!" is absolutely useless. Is the Origin authentication that lets customers install on five different machines in a day fairly lenient as these things go? Sure, except for a couple of things. First, it clearly doesn't work all that well, since simply swapping out a GPU suddenly counts as a whole new machine. Second, why have this restriction at all? If your platform can't be relied upon to properly determine legitimate copies of games, then ditch the platform. Don't back that failure up by annoying paying customers with restrictions designed to buttress your failed attempts.

But all of that may end up being besides the point, because Hagedoorn's early point is the key: why is EA sniffing around our hardware configurations? The company had damned well better be sure that there is something in the EULA that allows for them to sniff out hardware swaps, something quite common amongst PC gamers, nevermind benchmarkers. But even if the EULA allows for this... what the hell?

Filed Under: benchmarking, drm, locked out, origin
Companies: ea

EA's Troubles Keep Getting Worse: Big Security Flaw Discovered In Origin Platform

from the another-day,-another... dept

Perhaps the timing is a coincidence, but following the absolutely disastrous SimCity launch, in which EA's focus on DRM seemed to get in the way of actually making a product that works, it's been announced that CEO John Riccitiello is stepping down at the end of the month. This is clearly not a planned succession situation, because the company's former CEO, Larry Probst, who ran EA from 1991 until 2007 when he handed it over to Riccitiello is taking over as interim CEO as they search for a real replacement. Perhaps they should look for someone who recognizes that providing a good product that people want to support is a better goal than "stopping piracy." Just a suggestion.

Of course, they may also have bigger issues to deal with. Rich Kulawiec was the first of a few of you to submit the news that researchers have demonstrated a pretty big security vulnerability in EA's Origin platform (the company's Steam competitor), which can be used to exploit local vulnerabilities on the computers of about 40 million Origin users. If you'd like to see the hack in action, there's a nice video. You can read the details directly, if you'd like, which comes complete with some graphics explaining how the security vulnerability, found in the URI handling of Origin, can be exploited: You get the feeling that March 2013 is a month that EA would prefer to forget ever existed.

Filed Under: origin, security
Companies: ea