EA Believes Origin Has Been A “Huge Success”

Bwahahahahahahahahaha, oh wait, they’re being serious. Well this is awkward. Hate it or dislike it, EA’s online gaming service is here to stay and the company is pretty happy with how things have gone for Origin in its first year.

Most gamers despise the service and it has received heavy criticism from all sides but EA’s SVP of global e-commerce David DeMartini feels it has been a “huge success” and will continue to grow in strength with the coming years.

“We’ve got 12 million downloads of the application. We have 50 partners: independent game developers and publishers who are publishing on the platform. We’ve generated over $150 million in revenue, which represents huge growth on a percentage basis versus the previous year. In every numerical dimension it was a huge success.”

He went on, “That said, the Origin feature-set last year was very foundational. When you start one of these services, you can’t leap to the glitzy features. You have to get the meat and potatoes down first.

He did acknowledge the criticisms of the service. “I think people have been critical of our efforts. And usually, we really appreciate their criticism. When you start a service, if nobody says anything about you, they don’t care about you, and you’re irrelevant. I would not say that’s the case with Origin. There are many people with opinions about Origin: where we should go, about features we’ve deployed.”

DeMartini went on to talk about how EA looks to improve the service in the near future. “Being self-critical of Origin, I would say it’s not sticky enough. And we want to put features in place where we fully take advantage of your friends lists and gameplay activities amongst all of your friends so you can compare achievements. We want you to be able to challenge your friends, and to challenge your friends to play other EA games to try and achieve things that might even be across EA games. A lot of people are loyal to us and we need to reward them with that stickiness, so we’re looking in that direction.”

I like the part where he glosses over the criticism Origin has received by complimenting the critics.