Newell issues damning assessment of EA’s Origin

Valve and Steam boss Gabe Newell has slammed EA’s rival Origin download service, saying that he "doesn’t think EA are doing anything super-well yet”.

"They have a bunch of smart people working on it but I think they’re still playing catch up to a lot of people who have been working in the space for a while,” he told SevenDayCooldown.

I think they’re recognising what the challenges are with building and scaling out this kind of system.

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

Newell did concede, however, that he would very much like EA’s games to return to Steam, arguing that its current strategy of releasing first party titles either exclusively through Origin or only the sites of Steam’s competitors is damaging.

I’d love to have EA’s games on Steam," he confessed. "Whatever they’re trying to do to create value for their customers is not a zero sum game.

"I think EA wants to take their shot at building their own alternative to Steam, and if they’re successful at that and their customers like that then that’s great. We think their customers would be happy if their games were on Steam. We tell them that on a regular basis.”