Markus Alexej “Notch” Persson,the founder of Mojang,the studio that created “Minecraft” praises EA’s digital platform,Origin.
Minecraft was developed for about a week before its public release on May 17, 2009, on the TIGSource forums, where it gained a considerable level of popularity. It has been continually updated and patched since then, and while it was still in alpha release, it garnered several hundred thousand sales and received critical notice and acclaim from many reviewers. It passed a million units sold on January 12, 2011,less than a month after reaching Beta. By February 18, 2012, the game had sold more than 5 million units.
He says that its good that Valve’s “Steam” has some competition now and that serious competitors are good to have.
“I think it’s a bit dangerous to only have one digital distribution platform like Steam,” he told GameSpy.
“I love Valve, but out of principle, I find the idea of one platform a bit scary. So I like that there are others competing – for example, Desura and Impulse, who recently got bought by GameStop. It’s a good thing that there are more.”
Origin was launched last year by EA,when suddenly the studio’s ‘Crysis 2′ went off of steam and few days later it’s ‘Dragon Age II” also vanished. EA later stated that Valve had some issues with the contract and that the decision to take off the game was entirely made by Valve. I don’t know if it was just to get back at Valve or wanting the freedom to sell their products on their on terms that EA launched Origin but it has been doing considerably well ever since it launched. Origin now has 9.3 million users, and more than one million are active every day. Steam’s witnessed five million people online at once, and has 35 million active users.
“Origin does a couple things badly compared to Steam, which is impressive since they had eight years to study Steam,” Notch continued.
“They should definitely have a chance to do their thing, but they might want to move away from titles that make people use it and show people why they should use it.
“But I think, in principle, it’s a good thing.”
Most people don’t prefer Origin over Steam is because it doesn’t have a vast game library to choose from and when EA executive Peter Moore was asked about it he said :
“It’s an open platform. There is nothing I would love more than to have Valve’s – everybody’s games. We’re talking to every publisher, as you can imagine.”
He further added,”It’s one of those things where I would ask give us 18 months to two years,” Moore concluded. “And if we sit here two years from now, start looking at it then.
“The ability to have your own direct platform with the consumer is going to be very important in the digital world going forward.”
EA’s starting to take Origin to a whole new level,I hope it doesn’t disappoint us.
-Haris.
