Gabe Newell on EA's Origin: "I don't think they're doing anything super well yet"

Valve co-founder Gabe Newell gave his views on Origin in the first episode of the Seven Day Cooldown podcast , suggesting that EA's digital distribution service isn't close to challenging Steam. "They have a lot of work to do to get to way they want to be and where I as a customer would want them to be," he said.

"That's isn't to say they won't build stuff in the future that is useful to software developers or gamers but they haven't done that yet."

Newell also reiterated that Valve are keen to have EA games back on Steam "We think their customers would be happy if their games were on Steam. We tell them that on a regular basis."

He later said "as we learn about this stuff we're all going to be making things better for other gamers. Tim Sweeney (Epic founder) doesn't look at Steam and say "Fuck! We shouldn't support that because that will hurt long term sales of the Unreal Engine." He's like, "that's pretty cool, that's pretty useful." So hopefully EA get their head to the same place."

At the moment EA are more likely to keep their heads where the money is. Back in February EA announced that Origin had amassed more than nine million registered users , and had churned out more than $100m in revenue. It look as though EA's Origin exclusives are currently doing very well for the platform. It's definitely more of a shop than a service at the moment, though. What do you think of Origin?

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Part of the UK team, Tom was with PC Gamer at the very beginning of the website's launch—first as a news writer, and then as online editor until his departure in 2020. His specialties are strategy games, action RPGs, hack ‘n slash games, digital card games… basically anything that he can fit on a hard drive. His final boss form is Deckard Cain.