Origin looted with infinite voucher
EA has decided to honour the codes that were used over the weekend to download hundreds of free games.
Over the weekend, North America-based participants in an EA survey were given a $20 voucher to spend on the digital storefront as thanks for completing the survey. Unfortunately for EA, someone discovered the coupon was reusable and not limited to a single use.
The infinite $20 codes were then distributed across Reddit and several forums leading to gamers plundering Origin for free copies of games including entries in the Mass Effect, Battlefield, Command and Conquer and the Dragon Age series.
EA has decided to not try and deactivate any of the purchases made as a result of its voucher accident. ‘We’ll honour all sales made with the coupon code over the weekend and hope fans enjoy their games,’ said an Origin community manager.
It is unclear exactly how long this Origin loophole was open for and the exact figure for how many games were given away for free is likely to be very high. Some users were posting hauls of more than 40 titles each.
Origin first launched in June 2011 as a rival to Valve’s Steam. It has since developed a reputation for being unreliable and regularly draws ire from the gaming community. The service currently has approximately 9.3 million users and gained a large install base by being a requirement for some of EA’s more high profile releases including Battlefield 3 and Mass Effect 3.
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Discuss in the forums ReplyThat is dumb.
Just because Steam isn't perfect doesn't justify use of the even less perfect Origin, plus the EA policy of forcing the use of Origin in addition to Steam is retarded.
Ea should sell its games on Steam as well as Origin, same goes in reverse for Valve games, that way consumers could actually choose and Steam and Valve would be forced to compete and improve, but the way it is currently they have no incentive to improve as they don't compete due to exclusives forcing gamers to use both.
The current situations with digital distribution is like if Tesco had an exclusive on all food and Sainsbury had an exclusive on toilet paper, which would force you to constantly shop in both places.
Just use your food wrappers. Sorted.
I wish I had seen this. I would have gotten all the battlefield DLC and tried to get back into it again.
No, it's like Tesco allowing you to buy Tesco-branded products only from Tesco, and Sainsburys allowing you to buy Sainsbury's branded products only from Sainsburys- which is *exactly* what they do.
A company can sell it's products where and when it likes. You don't to like it since you don't HAVE to buy any of them.
"the EA policy of forcing the use of Origin in addition to Steam is retarded. "
You're not forced to do anything of the sort and I fail to see why Origin is so utterly terrible to you. 40 free games (and, let's face it, many of those games - Dragon Age, Battlefield, C&C, Mass Effect, Dead Space - are superb games) is about a grand's worth of product. You're seriously saying that if someone gave you a grand in cash to spend on games so long as you installed Origin you'd turn it down and yet you'd run Steam on your PC quite happily (which, by the way, gives me a slower download rate than Origin does).
+1 to this!
I agree with you, although it's not quite the same situation, as you can only buy EA products from Origin, whereas you can buy loads of different publisher's products from Steam.
A closer analogy would be Steam is like a generalist car salesroom, which stocks lots of car brands, whereas Origin is like a dedicated Vauxhall dealership next door; it only sells Vauxhall cars. If I was the Vauxhall dealership, I'd be tempted not to let the generalist salesroom stock our cars, makes much more sense to funnel customers directly to our door and cut out the middle man. Which is exactly what EA has done with Origin - it's common sense.
Why? Because the last 3 times I installed it Ive had nothing but trouble with it. Random disconnects in BF3, unable to connect, and last, but certainly not least, my games not showing up when I do eventually connect (I only had BF3 and Mass Effect 3 mind you) and being told by EA that Sorry bro, our records shows that you dont have any games on your account yet. You have to buy them before they show up on your account after asking them why my games isnt showing up.
Yes, the disconnects etc is probably from flaky internet (Welcome to South Africa) but even with the flaky internet Ive not had a problem with Steam being stupid about it.
I opened steam just now and checked how long it took to open. Roughly 10 seconds.
Is 10 seconds really that big a deal? As it sit there, with 2 chat windows open from friends who said hello because I wasn't on steam in a day or 2, the memory usage reported by Windows Task Manager sits at 48 260K. Less than 50mb. Skype is using ~63mb. My email program is using ~40. Chrome is using ~140mb. I have Lord of the Rings Online running in windowed mode and thats using ~900mb.
I cant imagine why ~50mb memory usage would be an issue when most semi-modern systems have about 4GB or more of the stuff...
Regarding downloading speeds, Im in South Africa. Im LUCKY if I can get 1mb out of a 4mb/10mb ADSL line. Maybe in the more modern countries where anything above that isnt some acid induced dream it would make a difference. Both Origin and Steam maxed out at about ~800kb so I didnt really see a difference between the two.
What I find dumb is that instead of asking WHY someone has a different opinion than you about something the first thing people do is to automatically go That is dumb.
The only games on Origin that Id be interested in would be BF3, Mass Effect 3 (which I did buy only to have EA tell me "No you didn't") and maybe the new Alice game.
I have boxed copies of Dragon Age: Origin and Awakening, C&C3 and the expansions, Dead Space 1, Crysis, Crysis Warhead, Mass Effect 1 and 2, Mirrors Edge. None of them asked me install Origin the last time I checked. And yes, after my experience with EA and Origin, that is exactly what Im saying. See above RE download speed...
Normally I dont reply or respond to stuff on forums or wherever (Evident by my post count and join date) and yes, I know this is the INTERNET , but Im rather surprised that people on BT actually seem to be offended because god forbid, Ive had a less than orgasmic experience with Origin and I dont like or want to use it again even if it meant I could get 40 free games of which I might play 3.
Yes, I do know Steam isnt perfect, far from it actually, but Ive had less issues and problems with Steam since I started using it (December 2007, Orange box release day purchase) than Ive had with Origin in the 6 months that Ive tried using it...
I shudder to think what an uproar it would cause if I mentioned that Im still using Vista...
In future Ill just make sure I have the same personal opinion about something before posting shall I?
That is why they send you this thing called Purchase Confirmation, with this thing called Order Number.
Oh dear. Argument fail. You can buy more than EA games from Origin. Sega, THQ and other (mostly smaller) developers have their games there. Granted its not a patch on steams 50 billion games but I hear this misinformation quite often.
Origin I find it annoying that you cannot stop the stupid advert box opening up when you 1st log in, like you can on Steam but it's just annoying but not enough for me to uninstall it and never try it again.
Steam again I just find the download speeds annoying, as I can never get more than 30Mb-40Mb download speeds from my 100Mb connection regardless of which server I connect to etc, but with Origin I max out at 102Mb download speeds.
The only advantage that I find on Steam is that you can create backup disc's of games you purchase as a digital purchase so, that you can burn a disc and then never have to worry about downloading the whole game again, and I know Origin gives you the option of keeping the installers but I don't find it to much of a issue with downloading the games each time because, I don't have to wait hours for the games to download like I do with Steam.
As for the Voucher thing that happened all I can say is well done EA on holding your hands up to your mistake and honoring the purchases even though the mistake was abused by some people, and to be honest I would have done the same and got all the games I want for free as I am sure most of us would have, just wish the survey was open to the UK as well as America or if it was that I didn't miss it.
Exactly.
Of course I don't have to buy them, I've not played any EA Game that requires Origin.
What I want is a digital distribution system for pc games that sells all games. You know, just like game or amazon do with physical games, but instead of physical media with digital distribution, if I want to buy a physical copy of Mass Effect 3 I can choose from various shops, why does that not apply for digital distribution other than plain greed and preventing competition?
Misinformation about Origin is big business for teh fanboys.
You get 30-40Mb out of steam and you're bitching about it?! Cry me a river dude, I wish I had the option of ordering and paying for even half of your 100Mb connection! You should be stoked that you get 30-40Mb! And besides, hours to download a game on 30-40Mb is something I'd like to see, I just bought War of The Roses last night and it took ONE hour to download at between 2-3Mb! Where I live 25 Mb is the max, and that's what I have. I never see that speed unless I'm doing a speed test though lol. They have just started rolling out 50 Mb "Wideband" in areas around me so maybe soon!
On a side note, people seem to forget how long it has taken Valve to get steam to this point. It's been out what, 5-6 years? Origin is pretty new in comparison, so of course there will be problems.
I absolutely loved everything about BF3 the game, I didn't even mind Origin really. What really pissed me off was the poor excuse for a server browser / match maker that was battlelog. I would either have to dig through servers and wait 5-10 minutes for the game to load up (i7, 12 GB RAM, GTX 570 = no excuse for long load times), or I would have it find me a match automatically and still have to wait 5-10 minutes only to be stuck into a dead or dying server half the time. If BF3 had the same server browser system as Bad Company 2 I would STILL be playing it! As of right now I have Bad Company 2 and the Vietnam DLC install, but no BF3 installed.
XXXXXXXspeople", and I don't see how it can be broken. Also the E-Commerce is ran by Digital River, a familiar name to me for some reason.We're really not THAT far away from not being able to buy physical copies at all. Jump forward 10 years, when you're all sporting Gigabit connections at home, will you even WANT a physical copy? Digital delivery is the future and naturally businesses will want to capture the biggest portion of that market as they can.
If you were a chief exec at EA who was losing, say, 20% of the revenue from every purchase to a competing company, would you not want to bring that in-house? Why do people think that the likes of EA are in business to be anything other than money-hungry business? Maybe EA (who have lost A LOT of money in recent years) need that extra % to stay afloat, keep people in jobs etc. Maybe if they went under and we didn't get any more Dragon Ages, Mass Effects or Battlefields you'll be happier somehow?
PS:- Game is possibly the worst example you could have ever used, considering the exclusivity deals they pull ON companies like EA to make sure you couldn't buy certain versions from anyone other than themselves....
Not for one second would I trust EA with all of those things, nevermind the fact that they don't offer most of them. Yes Steam has problems sometimes but it remains a superior service. If EA actually caught up and shown signs that they are actually concentrating on that service as a real means to enhance the gaming experience on PCs as well as supporting indie developers so much then I would be able to consider it but there are no signs of that happening yet and it most likely won't for a while.
I will be losing out on EA games but to be honest I'm not that fussed, they don't really offer anything I'm that bothered about these days, I still have my account with BF3 on it but I haven't played in months. I won't even pirate their games as some sort of signal like some silly people do, I'll just be happy without them :-)
I have to ask...*what* Origin vs Steam battle? They're not mutually exclusive...you can run both...you don't have to choose one or the other. This "battle" exists only in the minds of the people who want to take a side to make some kind of ill-conceived point about what publishers/distributors should or should not be doing.
The winning side is the one that chose both sides.
Those who exploited it, triumphed. Those who did not, lost out.
Oh it's such a shame that these people got a handful of free games they can only use on our locked in platform. I know, we'll let them KEEP them, out of the goodness of our hearts, it was our mistake after all.
What Really Happened.
Marketing Droid 1: Let's accidentally let people download unlimited games by not capping this voucher. Even with the fastest downloads they won't get a lot - and let's face it they wouldn't have bought them anyway so we lose no money. What we do get is a few hundred thousand more Origin users, who will be more inclined to see our production placements on our annual <Insert Sport Game Name Here> versions, Command & Conquer 17 and all the other repeated IP with a bit of extra chrome we churn out. They'll buy SOME of it and that's all that matters.
Marketing Droid 2: Two days of free games should be about enough. Let's do it.
Marketing Droid 3: The news sites will be talking about it for a week. Forum users all over the world will be upset they missed out. SOME OF THEM WILL ACTUALLY INSTALL ORIGIN TO SEE WHAT THE FUSS IS, AND BUY OUR GAMES. Marketing Droid 1, you deserve a pint. Heck, make that half a pint. We're not made of money. *sits on gold-plated airondack chair*
I missed out :(
Consult the previous comments that are putting Steam against Origin.
*facepalms*
Yes..thank you, I can read. It was a rhetorical question.
I felt like giving an unhelpful reply to an unhelpful reply.