EA's Origin reaches 4M client installs

EA's Origin service has hit 4 million client downloads, and the company plans to expand the marketplace to include third-party content "very soon."

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EA's Origin service has been through its share of controversies, but it's already made some significant progress. EA CFO Eric Brown says the client has hit 4 million installs so far, and the company expects "substantially" more this holiday season. He also claimed we'll be seeing third-party content coming to Origin "very soon."

"We're fairly excited about Origin," Brown said at a UBS conference in London, reported by Gamasutra. "We have about 4 million installs of the client, we expect that number to climb substantially as we enter this ... holiday season." That claim makes sense, of course. Many EA PC games use Origin as a default client already, and the prospects for an uptick this holiday season are no-doubt fueled by the Origin requirement for marquee titles like Battlefield 3.

That's not all that EA has planned for the service, though. One major difference between Origin and its competitors is third-party content, which EA hopes to remedy soon. "Initially, Origin is set up to deliver EA games, but very soon, we'll be delivering third-party content to Origin," Brown said.

Brown says EA will tout its more than 130 million registered users, payment methods, and other infrastructure features to attract other companies. He didn't specify which games are first on the block, but building a robust selection will go a long way towards putting it on-par with the biggest of its competitors, Steam. And Origin certainly has a lot to do, if it wants to reach the kind of activity seen on Steam, which averages about 3 million concurrent online users at any given time.

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  • reply
    September 9, 2011 12:30 PM

    Steve Watts posted a new article, EA's Origin reaches 4M client installs.

    EA's Origin service has hit 4 million client downloads, and the company plans to expand the marketplace to include third-party content "very soon."

    • reply
      September 9, 2011 12:50 PM

      THEY'RE TAKING OVER THE PLANET!

    • reply
      September 9, 2011 12:52 PM

      Seeing as how EA is throwing in everything into Origin, I'll probably end up bowing to get it because I really want BF3.

      Fuck Origin, though. I'm going to bitch and complain every second I have to use this piece of shit service.

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        September 9, 2011 12:56 PM

        I have an Origin account and its not that bad. I used the EA dl manager before and it just migrated all my games over to it. Yeah it sucks having you games all over the place instead of one nice client but, meh. Stuff like this won't stop me from playing high quality games. If that were true there would be a lot of great game that use GFWL I would have passed up. GFWL (although much better then it used to be) still blows.

        • reply
          September 9, 2011 12:58 PM

          So can I roll my old battlefield installs into it? Like the ones I bought through the digital downloader before

          • reply
            September 9, 2011 12:59 PM

            They're supposed to be in, but yes. Just use the keys you have for them. If you don't remember them, contact EA support and they'll check your account for you.

          • reply
            September 9, 2011 1:00 PM

            [deleted]

          • reply
            September 9, 2011 1:17 PM

            Some of my games work with it and some don't it's weird. My retail copies Crysis/warhead/ME1 games will not activate, but my retail copy of Mirrors Edge for an example would. I also could not activate a D2D version of Bulletstorm but I got but my D2D version of Dragon Age 2 linked up fine. It's seems to be hit or miss at this point but overall Origin isn't too bad.

          • reply
            September 9, 2011 1:24 PM

            To test that theory I just now activated Bad Company 2 (Steam edition) on Origin just fine.

        • reply
          September 10, 2011 12:08 AM

          This is exactly how I feel about it. I'm still not going to buy anything using Origin, but I'm not going to avoid it either.

      • reply
        September 9, 2011 10:51 PM

        Get over being so butt hurt about Origin

      • reply
        September 9, 2011 11:30 PM

        You'll crack. You're going to bend over and take their massive cock and you're going to love it.

    • reply
      September 9, 2011 12:52 PM

      Remember when they changed all the ea accounts over to origin accounts, did that boost this number?

      • Ebu legacy 10 years legacy 20 years
        reply
        September 9, 2011 12:54 PM

        Only if the holders of those converted accounts downloaded the new client.

        My account conversion, for instance, doesn't count.

      • reply
        September 10, 2011 6:11 AM

        Yup, all those people that play the sims had ea downloader switched to origins even if it is operated in the background.

    • reply
      September 9, 2011 12:52 PM

      this makes me sad :(

    • reply
      September 9, 2011 12:53 PM

      I just heard a collective intake of breath, like a million Shackers are about to descend on this thread to express outrage.

    • reply
      September 9, 2011 1:09 PM

      Title should have been "4m 'gamers' bend over and take it in the poop chute" instead.

    • reply
      September 9, 2011 1:26 PM

      Competition is a good thing, drives innovation.
      I tried out origin, its reminds me a lot of steam when it started out.
      Steam got bad press & hate at first but now is accepted.
      I for one will buy games from retail, amazon, greenmangaming, direct2drive, origin, & steam depending on who has the best deal.

      • reply
        September 9, 2011 1:34 PM

        If it's a steamworks game, then I'll buy it from anywhere too. In the meantime, I don't want to have to remember which service I used to purchase which game from and which password I have for that service so I can download said game at a time of my convenience. And then go patch hunting because HappyDriveManOrigin-Gaming-is-it-limited-or-unlimited-downloads service doesn't auto patch my games for me.

        • reply
          September 9, 2011 5:06 PM

          Do you really forget which client you bought games from?

          • reply
            September 9, 2011 5:40 PM

            Lets see, there's gamersgate, direct2drive, steam, impulse, greenmangaming, amazon, origin.....

            I have over 200 game purchases.... what do you think? Do you think if I spread those out among 7 different digital download services I would remember where exactly I bought each title from?

            • reply
              September 9, 2011 9:16 PM

              It's a minor inconvenience at worse. Weren't you the guy that posted some stupid shit about Origin the other day? You totally misread something and for it to be nuked cause you looked like an idiot. Well it didn't get nuked.

            • reply
              September 10, 2011 12:05 AM

              So you only use Steam then? Or is Origin the only one that you won't use?

    • reply
      September 9, 2011 1:27 PM

      Hold on to your butts.

    • reply
      September 9, 2011 1:29 PM

      After Skyrim, Rage, and MW3 hits Valve will announce that Steam is bigger than Origin will ever imagine to be. In response, EA will get mad and charge everyone double the price for DLC to all their games.

      • reply
        September 9, 2011 9:10 PM

        How many of those games are large scale multiplayer games with lots of vehicles? They're not really the same kind of games...so I don't get why people keep saying "oh well, I'll just play Skyrim instead" when its not the same sort of game...it doesn't scratch the same sort of itch.

        MW3 doesn't even scratch the same itch...its a different sort of game...which is why I'll be buying it as well as BF3, Rage, and Skyrim along with many other games.

    • reply
      September 9, 2011 1:46 PM

      4 million installs is NOTHING considering they have 130 million registered accounts... How they're going to convince people that the latter means anything in regard to exposure on the Origin store is beyond me. That's like Apple saying, "We've sold a million iPods, but only 30k people bothered installing iTunes." Pretty awful adoption rate.

      And anyway, it's meaningless if they don't specify how many active users they have. That number might be less than 2 mil (1.5% adoption) for all we know. And concurrent users? Fugheddaboutit.

      A year ago, Steam announced they had 30 million ACTIVE users. They don't bother making announcements about total registered.

      • reply
        September 9, 2011 1:48 PM

        The adoption rate will skyrocket when they start requiring Origin for EA games as Valve does for their own games.

        • reply
          September 9, 2011 2:11 PM

          It will go up, sure, but I don't know if I'd say 'skyrocket.' Even if BF3 sells 8 million copies (very generous estimation) less than half of them will be on PC, and most of those people will already have Origin installed. I would bet that very close to all PC pre-orders are from people that have at least taken a look at it.

      • reply
        September 9, 2011 2:19 PM

        http://store.steampowered.com/stats/

        Steam's active concurrent users usually hovers around 3 million ±250k a day. True, it's not "active accounts", but I think this is a better measurable regardless.

        • reply
          September 9, 2011 4:07 PM

          Actually, it peaked at around 4 million last weekend, and is consistently between 3.5 and 3.75 million most other days lately. Really makes EA look like crap, in fact I wouldn't be surprised if they felt compelled to announce their own 4 mil figure in response to this milestone, knowing most people wouldn't know the difference in measurement.

          • reply
            September 9, 2011 5:13 PM

            where are you seeing this? i can only see stats for today and yesterday

        • reply
          September 9, 2011 4:08 PM

          At least 4.09 million, to be exact: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=443570

      • reply
        September 9, 2011 3:08 PM

        Had to install the damn thing to get back my Spore cdkey. Unintall it 2days later because i didnt find the "dont start on boot" option

        • reply
          September 9, 2011 5:10 PM

          its there, you can scroll down (the scroll bar is kinda hidden)

    • reply
      September 9, 2011 4:24 PM

      NOTE TO SHACK: Let's doublecheck Origin usage numbers with Steam in that week between Christmas and New Year's.

    • reply
      September 9, 2011 5:20 PM

      Get over it. If you don't like it, don't use it. Don't go around being an asshole on the Internet for the people who choose to use it. I'm using it, and have gotten quite a few cheap games and am very happy with it.

      Get the fuck over it.

      • reply
        September 9, 2011 5:35 PM

        [deleted]

      • reply
        September 9, 2011 6:39 PM

        LOL obvious fanboy is obvious. keep defending an inferior product forcefully pushed by a historically abusive producer... and maybe we'll see your point eventually. laf.

        • reply
          September 9, 2011 7:39 PM

          Yes, I am an Origin fanboy. That is why I have over 100 games on Steam.

        • reply
          September 9, 2011 7:47 PM

          My God, are the frontpagers out in full force today or something? So much retardation beyond our normal bickering.

          • reply
            September 10, 2011 12:06 AM

            But it's EA, you have to bash EA on the internet. Wait until Ubisoft announces another game, then the Ubisoft hate will come out.

      • reply
        September 9, 2011 9:19 PM

        They'd rather come here and rant to make their lives feel better. Can't we just talk about the cool shit?

    • reply
      September 9, 2011 5:40 PM

      Downloads != Installs != Active Users

    • reply
      September 9, 2011 10:55 PM

      [deleted]

    • reply
      September 9, 2011 10:55 PM

      Releasing Origin client downloads for the press release instead of active or concurrent users is pretty weak, isn't it?

    • reply
      September 9, 2011 10:56 PM

      At the end of the day, Origin won't ever be as big nor as good as Steam, so who cares?

    • reply
      September 9, 2011 11:25 PM

      RIP Steam.

    • reply
      September 10, 2011 2:03 AM

      Competition is good, I'm pretty sure we'll see some awesome new features on both services soon

    • reply
      September 10, 2011 5:51 AM

      Valve is following the build it and they will come methodology.

      EA is following the force them and they will buckle.


      Let's see who wins.

      • reply
        September 10, 2011 9:48 AM

        You're totally right, Valve totally doesn't force people to use Steam to play their games.

      • reply
        September 10, 2011 2:22 PM

        Lolruserious?

        I can play every game currently on Origin without running Origin itself at all. Steam games I can't even play in offline mode without connecting to the internet THEN going offline because it can't save offline log-in data for crap. The only Origin games I'm even hearing about that are going to require Origin running in order to run are BF3 and ME3, the former of which is using Origin little differently than how Steamworks uses Steam.

        • reply
          September 13, 2011 2:35 PM

          You can with a little bit of a workaround, at least with non-valve games. You can go into steam/steamapps/common/ find the game you want, launch the .exe, and play them. I've almost always played FONV this way, since steam likes to start the launcher, and I use fallout mod manager. You can even create a shortcut for future convenience.

    • reply
      September 10, 2011 6:36 AM

      This made me chuckle.

      http://chattypics.com/files/blah_t077zw6712.png

      • reply
        September 12, 2011 9:14 AM

        I saw that too... thought hah what the hell

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