Origin seems to have few fans fighting in its corner, but surely everyone can be glad that the Mac is being taken more seriously as a gaming platform. Electronic Arts today launched the Mac client for its digital distribution platform with 45 Mac titles from EA and other publishers, some of which are automatically given to users who own the Windows edition.
Origin has done little to distinguish itself from other digital distributors, beyond hosting fewer sales and being required for newer EA games, but it's finally getting a feature the competition hasn't had for yonks. A coming patch will bring built-in livestreaming through Twitch, along with the option to add non-Origin games to your library and an assortment of tweaks.
Steam Greenlight was flooded with hundreds of games, including countless hoax and illicit entries, within hours of launching last Thursday, which apparently makes it quite difficult to fulfil its purpose of filtering Steam store submissions. To bring the volume down and ward off trolls, Valve has added a $100 fee for submitting a game and improved the selection users are shown. Though Valve donates the $100 to charity, it's rubbing some indies the wrong way.
The Origin client was in a sorry state when EA relaunched its digital distribution platform, especially compared to the mighty Steam, but it has been improving. Thirteen months later, client version 9.0 is coming, and what can we expect from this revision? User interface changes, mostly.
Valve has muttered and murmured about bringing Steam and its Source engine to Linux before, and now it's revealed the plan--port Steam and Left 4 Dead 2 to Ubuntu 12.04, then work from there. Steam will come to Linux in all its glory, and Valve's building a speedy OpenGL version of Source it can use for more of its games too.
You and I may get very excited about the big sales frequently run by Steam and many other PC digital distributors, but the chap behind Origin at Electronic Arts is not convinced such huge discounts are good. Interviewed at E3, EA's senior VP of global ecommerce David DeMartini opined that offering big discounts on Steam "cheapens your intellectual property."
Crowd-funding has exploded this year, thanks in no small part to Kickstarter, but even games that meet their funding goals will have to get it out to the fans. EA's Origin service is taking a generous step in that direction, by waiving distribution fees for the first 90 days on any game that has been successfully crowd-funded.
The size and state of the PC digital distribution market can be difficult to assess, as platforms and publishers are largely unwilling to share their sales figures. When it comes to The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, though, there can be little doubt about where they all stand, as CD Projekt today revealed the RPG's first six months of digital sales figures.
Who came out on top? Steam, by a huge margin, followed by CD Projekt's own Good Old Games.
The Humble Indie Bundle popularized the 'pay what you want' model for indie games. Now, new site Indie Royale is running with it. Every two weeks, Indie Royale will launch a 'pay what you want' bundle of four indie games, but with a minimum price that rises and falls depending on how generous customers are.
The first bundle is available now, packing Gemini Rue, Sanctum, Nimbus, and A.R.E.S.: Extinction Agenda.
Kids ages two to fourteen spend $0.21 on digital content out of every dollar's worth of entertainment they buy today, according to a study in the NPD Group's new 'Kids and Entertainment Content, 2011 Edition.' That's up from just two years ago in 2009, when the ratio stood at $0.15 out of the dollar. And they start young; by the age of seven, 50 percent say they have paid for their first digital purchase—with and without help from mom and dad or their friends. "Kids are not skittish to use technology that is available to them," said the NPD’s analyst Anita Frazier.
GameFly, the subscription-based video game rental service, plans to make a dramatic entry this coming holiday into the digital market for PC games. The company announced plans to debut an online digital store for PC games within a digital client that includes a number of other features, such as "Unlimited PC Play." GameFly subscribers will have access to "a large and ever-growing collection of titles" for the Windows/Mac that can be downloaded and played as many times as they want.
Client features personal game libraries, news, HD videos, and more »
![EA building Origin 'exclusives' [Update: didn't pull Crysis 2 from Steam]](http://cf.shacknews.com/images/20110301/ealogo_17147.nssp.jpg)
[Update: 11:10] EA has told Giant Bomb that it didn't pull Crysis 2 from Steam. Rather, Crytek's shooter was pushed out by new Steam terms.
"It's unfortunate that Steam has removed Crysis 2 from their service," a company representative said. "This was not an EA decision or the result of any action by EA." Read more »
Digital distributors already regularly offer mega-savings on PC games but GamersGate intends to take things one step further. Yesterday it announced plans for 'FreeGames,' a "free-to-play ad supported platform for PC and Mac games."
FreeGames will let users download and play games for free, in return for simply watching a "short" advert when the game launches. You'll be limited to having only five free games on your account at any one time, but GamersGate does cryptically mention there'll be "the capability to add additional game." No details on how that'll work, not yet. Read more »
Digital distributor Direct2Drive quietly launched a rental scheme for downloadable PC games last week, though so far it's looking somewhat less than inspiring.
D2D charges $5 for five hours of playtime, then if you want to keep the game, your $5 will be knocked off its price. The selection is very limited at the moment, with only Divinity II - Ego Draconis, F.E.A.R., Race Driver: Grid and Silent Hill: Homecoming available now. D2D notes that "our rental selection will grow in time." Read more »
The event of Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale's sales passing 100,000 units has led the Japanese PC RPG's localiser Carpe Fulgur to give a little insight into the world of digital distribution. Carpe Fulgur further revealed that Chantelise, also by Recettear developer EasyGameStation, will be the next game it brings Westward.
"Are the old C&C titles among the Mac ones? I really want Red Alert 2 on the Mac."
- Mad Brahmin Disease See all 11 comments