When EA re-launched their digital download service as Origin as a direct competitor to the hugely successful Steam, it had a lot to live up to, and with the exception of consistently fast download speeds, it still arguably falls short in much of its functionality.

However, EA have big plans for their orange online store-front and in their recent investor conference (via: seekingalpha), revealed that more social features and more ways of accessing the store are in the works.

EA Investor Relations VP Peter Ausnit explained that "You're going to see, over the next 12 months, some milestones and a roadmap of features that will include more social features, enhancements to the way that our consumers can access Origin"

Not only just focus on the PC but other platforms as well, and then building in different business models, so that we can not just do direct-to-consumer downloads as we currently do with full games or DLC but also different types of business models will allow us to aggregate our consumers and provide them with better opportunities and price value relationships for our content. So there is a very detailed and long-term roadmap to make this a portal to our consumer on a global basis. Rolling it out in a fundamental way as well globally is part of our plans as well. It's pretty much Western world only right now, and as you can imagine, our ability to reach into other regions will be very important. But think about more social community-oriented features, think about different models and think about more and more third-party publishers coming on board than already the pretty good slate that we have right now.

We recently saw Steam nudge onto iOS, but EA CEO John Riccitiello elaborated that Origin does actually have a similar presence there as well

And if you take your Android or iOS device right now and open for example, Scrabble and hit the EA button at the bottom, you'll be linked to what is essentially the Origin store, and that's transacting today and effectively so. So it's a very early implementation, but it provides access to your Origin friends, has links to all of your Facebook friends, has access to all of our mobile content. And that's been deployed. I use it everyday. We haven't made a big noise with it yet, primarily because it's in its early stage, think of it as a second early beta.

As for the desktop states, he explained that Origin "is now installed on more than 9.3 million desktops, and within the quarter, Origin recorded a milestone, over 1 million daily unique users".

With the recent spate of announcements of more third party publishers joining the fray, Origin looks like its here to stay.