Origin is awful

[MeMeMeMe]

Origin has at least two features that are advantages over steam, but they are also still guilty of quite a few underhanded and anti-consumer practices.

The new refund policy is good, but nowhere near as good as it looks. Games have to be bought on the origin store, and prices there are always going to be inflated - for example, crysis 3 is currently "63% off", and is still >£14 - whereas I can already buy it in a store for £13 with no sale, and that price is only going to get cheaper.

The second good thing, is a genuinely good thing. You can register a lot of games bought outside the origin store on Origin. Handy for backup purposes if nothing else.

I have just registered 9 games I had on steam or retail disk, but there were also a couple that should register and don't.

Funny thing: I installed medal of honour from the humble bundle on steam. I then copied the CD key from steam and used that to register it on origin. And it's a different key than the one you get in the origin bundle. I'm sure that's an oversight! I never thought to check if you could do that with other games in the bundle.

 

[VincentHanna]

The convenience of not having to go to a store in the first place is worth an extra £1.

I would prefer if EA games were available on Steam to be honest, and I don't think Origin is anywhere near as good (They seriously need to implement a big picture mode) but competition is always healthy.

 

[shadow_boxer]

Origin down for everyone else?, has been today and yesterday

Was ok for me yesterday and this morning. Managed to download Fifa.

 

[GTO656]

Finally downloaded the rest of the games, it needs to be updated to the latest beta version for it to work out.

 

[Twentymac]

UPDATE:

Got it all working now chaps.

I went onto the origin facebook page and someone had asked the same thing as I did. The guy was told to go here : http://support.microsoft.com/kb/972034
To reset the hosts file, I remembered that a few weeks ago I had changed mine for some software I was installing.

All back to defaults now and I'm downloading games all good and well!

 

[MeMeMeMe]

The convenience of not having to go to a store in the first place is worth an extra £1.

I would prefer if EA games were available on Steam to be honest, and I don't think Origin is anywhere near as good (They seriously need to implement a big picture mode) but competition is always healthy.

You're forgetting that I was comparing the temporary sale price at a reduction of 63% (the kind of deep price reductions EA said they weren't going to do), to the price it can be bought elsewhere all the time (not a sale). When those other places have sales, their prices will drop further!

Most of the time you want to buy a game it's not going to be on sale, so there'll be a massive difference in price (Crysis 3 is still £40 in the origin store normally. The Sims are £30-40 per pack, and so on). Publisher store fronts like Origin, the Microsoft marketplace, Ubisoft's store, and so on always try to keep the price high (even old games - Dead Space 1 is still £10 in the Origin Store).

So, price wise, it will be very rare to be worth buying something at the Origin store. If they have a sale, they might drop to the price it's usually available somewhere else. But if you're waiting for a sale, you may as well wait till other places have a sale, and you'll still get it cheaper.

 

[d_brennen]

The main problem here seems to be peoples download speeds and faulty PC's, nowt wrong with Origin, i think it's quite good.

4/10, amateur trolling at best