By: Beyhan Moustafa

EA’s release of Origin, their dedicated online digital distribution service has been met with lukewarm feedback from its users and the company has come out to reassure their users that their ‘aim is to be a better version of Steam.’

In a recent interview with MCV, David DeMartini, EA senior VP of global ecommerce stated that, "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."

When Valve boss Gabe Newell mentioned how Origin has not yet done anything ‘super-well’, DeMartini added that "If 12 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 12m people have downloaded Origin, we have over 50 partners that have flocked to the service in less than 12 months, and we did over $150m in revenue, which represented 400 per cent growth over the previous year – those numbers show we are making huge progress."

DeMartini also included a rather interesting analogy to the social media services: "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."

Source: Gaming Union