Valve’s Gabe Newell on EA’s Origin

The difference between Origin and Steam has been widely debated, but it’s no secret that the general consensus is that Steam is just more awesome (ok, just kidding around). Anyway, Gabe Newell, the head of Valve has finally given his thoughts on EA’s Origin.

In a podcast with Seven Day Cooldown, Newell expressed that he didn’t think EA is doing anything super-well yet.

"They have a bunch of smart people working on it but I think they're still playing catch up to a lot of people who have been working in the space for a while. I think they're recognising what the challenges are with building and scaling out this kind of system," he says. “That's not to say they won't build stuff in the future that is useful to software developers or to gamers, but they haven't done that yet." 

He also mentions that he would still love to have EA’s games on Steam.

"I think EA wants to take their shot at building their own alternative to Steam, and if they're successful at that and their customers like that then that's great. We think their customers would be happy if their games were on Steam. We tell them that on a regular basis.

"As we learn about this stuff we're all going to be making things better for other gamers. Tim Sweeney [Epic Games founder] doesn't look at Steam and say 'we shouldn't support that because that will hurt long term sales of the Unreal Engine'. He's like, 'that's pretty cool, that's pretty useful'. So hopefully EA get their head to the same place."