Weekend Reading: The Downside of an Origin vs. Steam Fight

Electronic Arts has put together a new digital distribution service, called Origin, and the interests of the publisher are now on a clear collision course with those of Steam, the Valve-created dominant force on the PC market, with the results probably bad for gaming, bad for the PC space and for most of the players. The main problem here is the fact that we are heading for closed communities, probably centered on publishers or maybe even fragmented to the level of developers, with players forced to use Origin for EA games, the coming Activision Blizzard service (probably Call of Duty Elite derived) for its games, a SEGA service for that publisher's game and so on.

Instead of a highly unified platform (one might dislike Steam, but that's where it is heading) gamers will have smaller or bigger neighborhoods, each with a unique keycard for access, each with its own rules and each with its own list of friends, probably incompatible with all the others.

In the aftermath of the Sony PlayStation Network hack, no one will be too happy to give their financial and personal information to a bunch of services with varying degrees of security and with fragmentation the problems posed by one of these digital distribution services going under will also become clearer.

Origin might be a smart move for Electronic Arts and might even evolve to be a better service in some ways that Steam, but it lacks the breadth needed to be the one dominating the PC space.

There's actually not a single company that can deliver a digital distribution service to bring access to all publishers working on the PC if it were launched now.

Steam benefited from a lucky break, the popularity of Half Life 2 at launch and a lack of interest from potential competitors until recently.

Unfortunately, its best days might just be behind it and we might just be entering a fragmented and exclusive focused future for PC-based digital distribution.

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