I'm starting to get more and more turned off by EA Origin, and it mainly has to do with their strategy for drawing in people, and their attempts to muscle into Steam territory using their library of IPs.

My initial thoughts on SimCity 5 were excitement, then a kind of neutrality when I heard it was always-on, and I thought "Ah I guess I could deal with it. I'll just grab it on Steam". Scratch that idea! The game is exclusive to EA Origin as part of their campaign to draw people to it to..what else could it be but...full control of the profits?

I've read a few articles on this recently and I'm tending to agree. Steam got where it did because of what it did, as well as the irresistible bargains. As one aarticle put it, Origin is "a horribly butchered steam", with fewer features and higher prices. So why does Origin have something like 30 million subscribers now? Perhaps the fact that everything noteworthy that EA makes seems to be exclusive to Origin. Can anyone imagine when Sims 4 becomes Origin enabled?

What are people's thoughts on Origin?

It's not a huge deal. Just a little bothersome to boot up every time I want to play Battlefield 3. I'm more annoyed by the browser plugins than Origin.

It's for Battlefield 3, because it launches through the browser to find servers and such. Also for their voice chat which I never use.

I don't know about Mass Effect.

I'm a PC gamer and i must say Origin is a big piece of Sh*t when comparing it to steam. You have no idea how many times BF3 crashes because of Origin. Oh and Punkbuster is a BIG POS as well. The Browser Plugins are annoying to the max

It sucks. No more needs to be said.

origin is okay but when you compare it to steam it is a piece of smelly of trash

and they wanted to make this Nintendo online infrastructure, Nintendo is wise with their decisions

Thanks for the feedback guys...

Does Origin offer any kinds of sales? Their games are expensive (similar to what I'd expect to pay for a boxed retail game). From what I've heard, they do sales sometimes, but it's nowhere near in the same realm as how Steam discounts its games...

EA did? Weird, I never heard anything about it. Have you got any more info about it? I'd like to read about it.

Pretty much this.

I only have it cause of ME3.