President of EA games Frank Gibeau has been talking to Gamesindustry.biz about the future of Origin. He discusses EA's enormous aims for the service, and suggests that we will see more EA games appearing exclusively on Origin in future.
EA have already announced that Star Wars: The Old Republic will only be available digitally on Origin. Gibeau says that “in the case of Star Wars we're trying to build an audience for Origin. And it's also an opportunity for us to better manage the downloads and how we bring people over from the beta and that sort of thing,”
"If we can use exclusive content or other ideas to help grow our audience then we're going to do that because we're growing a platform.”
However, Gibeau suggests it's unlikely that all of EA's games will be exclusive to their digital download service. “I think long-term you'll see we believe in reach so we will have other digital retailers for our products because we want to reach as many audiences as possible.”
“We're the worldwide leader in packaged goods publishing, we'd like to be the worldwide leader in digital publishing. And we think that EA has unique strengths there related to what we can do with our content, because we're a content creator as well as a retailer in this business.
"But in general it's not just a retail site, it's a community, it's a platform, it has traits much like you see with Steam or PSN or Xbox Live, but it's unique to EA.”
“You talk about platform exclusives like Halo or Uncharted… EA's going to have some of our own platform exclusives.”
Controversy erupted yesterday over the removal of Crysis 2 from Steam , which suggested that EA might have removed the game to drive more sales to Origin. It turned out to be the result of a slightly less exciting behind the scenes terms dispute between Steam and Crytek.
