uhh dude, unreal have had a url protocol for like ever, indeed you could even take it a step further and have a map with multiple servers in different portals so depending on which door you went in you would connect to a different server.

All EA are doing is responding to Steam, pure and simple, and they have chosen their biggest AAA title of the year as a way to seed their client base so they can I assume from their perspective, get as many people possible to install their new delivery platform so that when they offer non AAA titles you go 'ahh dont need steam now already have a origion account' and get it from them instead.

Its just a fight for digital delivery using you as the point system

But, dont feel bad for steam, they did exactly the same thing to seed steam with as many people as they could by way of CS new versions, followed quickly after with some other crap third party games you could buy too in order to make their proposition appealing to the publishers.

term, steam made the market, and it offers plenty of perks do the devs, and producers (in way of anti pirating and money) there was no real reason for EA to go down this root other than for greed

and if anyone argues that it is good for us, as the comp will drive the prices of games down, I say pull your head out-a ya arse, it has been shown time and again steam are not the one dictating the price of new releases, and seemlying (when they can) they have had some good deals

I find it funny how people forget how much everyone hated steam when it came out.

Agree with Dan. I've never understood the whole 'big company == greed' thing.

Haha, Steam being the only one to really designate online prices sure is good hey guys!? Guys? Oh wait yeah, it's not. Having EA's Origin with more publishers joining up means Steam will have to watch it's price gouging, and further improve their services, just as Origin should as well. And yeah, people do forget how horribly shit Steam was 4 years ago. Hell, if HL2 didn't do so well, it would be dead in the water.

The lowest prices nowadays are online CD key stores, and it's been that way for a while... at least for games that allow this kind of activation.

I don't see how another digital distributor will improve the prices being offered by CD key online stores so I don't see how more platforms will improve anything for me or the people I know.

Publishers set the price, steam gets their cut. Origin will be the same. There could be a difference in the share the publisher gets I guess.

I suspect we will see more exclusives from specific publishers/IPs being pushed to one platform or the other - I imagine we will see a lot of games that only allow key activation on one of them. So rather than competition, we just have a more annoying and complicated monopoly. I'll be glad to be proven wrong on this if the time comes.

I already have games on both steam and impulse and hardly relish dealing with the dozen or so new ones likely to spawn in the coming years.

Though if bricks and mortar ever entirely go, we may see an end to the traditional CD key all together, and I guess cd key stores would be killed off at the same time? Depressing thought. Imagine if your only choices to purchase games were origin and steam, impulse etc, and all were charging the usual "Australian privilege" double price rate.

I guess there's always VPN and russian/brazilian release versions which are normally sold at half the price of the US RRP. Maybe I should learn some spanish in advance?

I was going to paste the same thing. It was a long time before people viewed Steam as a good thing.

And now we're seeing it as a bad thing about because of terrible regionalised pricing which has just made purchasing digital content annoying again.

Just sent my US mate $60 via Paypal for Skyrim *sigh*

But Ice, having another digital platform can never really harm anyone. Sure, it's a bit of a hassle to have seperate games on different distributions, but it's not THAT hard to open origin up and play. For the majority of people, no one really cares, it's just the minor that whine the most. And it's funny, because in this day and age, if your a gamer, you will have at least 4GB of 1600MHz RAM, so there isn't any REAL worry about Origin + Steam hogging your resources.

Hell, EA even lets you put your Steam CD keys of their games into Origin, which is a win win as well. I have BC2 and BF2 plugged into Origin, along with Star Wars. And once Origin get a few more publishers, things will be sweet. Yes you can get things uber cheap at the CD key distributions, but you take a chance really. I was lucky not to be stung when I bought a BF3 key from CJS CD Key, but the horror stories I heard from people trying to get one, I was damn lucky. At least with Steam/Origin, you can buy it and know your going to get a CD Key that works and on time.

I only buy 2 games a year at most, and then don't play them much, so every time I run steam it wants to update

This is one of my beefs. I don't think the bandwidth of ADSL2+ is ready for applications wanting to download updates willy-nilly as they please.