Tuesday, January 24th 2012
Origin Expands Games Catalog, DRM-Free Evangelist Joins DRM Scheme
Origin is the fledgling online download account-based DRM service from Electronic Arts launched last June, that is home to Battlefield 3. To compete effectively against other similar services, the industry-leading Steam in particular, it must offer more content. To this end, Origin has added 11 publishers to its portfolio, reports CVG. These are Trion Worlds, Robot Entertainment, Freebird Games, Recoil Games, Autumn Games, 1C Company, inXile entertainment, Paradox Interactive, Core Learning Ltd, N3V Games and CD Projekt RED. That last one is interesting, because CD Projekt RED owns and runs www.gog.com, the website dedicated to selling DRM-free games.Now the vast majority of those games are pretty old, in the order of 5-15 years, but their own title, The Witcher 2 is current and also comes without DRM from gog.com hence, the obvious question is why are they signing up with a DRM service? Will they end up putting all their current games behind the DRM curtain? This is a possibility, because their recent attempts at extracting payment from alleged pirates backfired spectacularly. Note that at the time of writing, searching for The Witcher 2 on Origin returns no results.
Now, from today, Trion's MMORPG Rift is available on Origin, with more titles from these publishers to follow in the coming months. Commenting on Origin's expansion, vice president of business development Craig Rechenmacher said: "Origin is focused on providing choice to consumers and the games they play. From blockbuster franchises to high-quality independent titles, we're bringing the industry's best content to one place. We're excited to welcome new partners and a diverse new line-up of titles to Origin today."
So, will Origin turn out to be a Steam killer? This can only happen if games are not exclusively tied to the one distribution platform, since that will make them complement each other and they can peacefully operate as a duopoly, which is bad for the customer looking to get games at good prices. One can see how neither the distribution platform operators, nor the games publishers have any interest in being made available on more than one platform. The best that can happen is that the distribution platforms compete with each other to attract the publishers by undercutting each other's commissions, thus allowing them to make more profit, which isn't something that the end customer cares about.
Now, from today, Trion's MMORPG Rift is available on Origin, with more titles from these publishers to follow in the coming months. Commenting on Origin's expansion, vice president of business development Craig Rechenmacher said: "Origin is focused on providing choice to consumers and the games they play. From blockbuster franchises to high-quality independent titles, we're bringing the industry's best content to one place. We're excited to welcome new partners and a diverse new line-up of titles to Origin today."
So, will Origin turn out to be a Steam killer? This can only happen if games are not exclusively tied to the one distribution platform, since that will make them complement each other and they can peacefully operate as a duopoly, which is bad for the customer looking to get games at good prices. One can see how neither the distribution platform operators, nor the games publishers have any interest in being made available on more than one platform. The best that can happen is that the distribution platforms compete with each other to attract the publishers by undercutting each other's commissions, thus allowing them to make more profit, which isn't something that the end customer cares about.