Origin aiming to be "better version" of Steam

EA's Origin online store wants to be a "better version" of the current downloadable game king, Valve's Steam service. EA senior vice president of global commerce David DeMartini told MCV that Origin is on "a path of constant improvement."

"There are better mousetraps that ultimately get built out of this innovation and the only way you get to the innovation is to have other people try and do a better version of what someone has previously done. And that's what we're attempting to do on Origin," said DeMartini.

"If MySpace had stayed the one answer in social networking and no one switched to Facebook, then we'd all be stuck on MySpace right now and we wouldn't have had the Facebook phenomenon."

"We're on a path of constant improvement. I didn't expect to be able to out-feature Steam within the first 12 months. But I'm quite optimistic we will differentiate ourselves as a service. We've built the foundation and now we are starting to add value to the service off of that foundation."

EA was slammed by some fans for pulling Crysis 2 from Steam after Origin's launch, but the move to keep some of its biggest titles on Origin has obviously helped in the long run.

"If twelve months ago you would tell me we'd be in the conversation, I would have been pretty happy. And when you look at the fact that over 12 million people have downloaded Origin, we have over fifty partners that have flocked to the service in less than twelve months, and we did over $150 million in revenue, which represented 400 percent growth over the previous year - those numbers show we are making huge progress."

"EA is in a really interesting place. We have this bar that is set so high, so that whether it is any of our games or services, we want to be 90 plus Metacritic at everything. Origin is moving in that direction. We are not there yet. We understand that. But we are going to get there soon."