Electronic Arts finally decided to make some changes to their old Origin platform. The first step is the name change. According to a recent report by GamesBeat, EA is renaming their platform – instead of Origin, EA games launcher is now called EA Desktop… Not the most original title but it has an intention…
Apparently, EA wants to double down on the success of EA Play branding and will offer renewed subscription services such as EA Play and EA Play Pro via their rebranded launcher. For those of you who were not following the news lately, last month EA said that it will be rebranding its EA Access and Origin Access subscription game services under the EA Play brand name.
And it won’t be just a rebrand. EA says that their new EA Desktop app will be “a next-generation PC gaming platform”, whatever that means. It will work faster than Origin and will allow players to launch their games easier. We can only hope that at least a portion of these statements are true since Origin was super clunky and slow.
EA senior vice president Michael Blank said this in his interview:
“The EA Desktop app is being designed to deliver a frictionless and socially connected experience that is faster for players to get into their games. We have revealed some of this, but we haven’t revealed all of it.”
From what we gather, there will be a short transition period. EA wants to keep all accounts, player’s game libraries, and friends’ lists in order to make this overhaul as seamless as possible. We can expect that for some time a portion of EA-published games might not be available for purchase on their platform. However, we finally understood why EA got together with Steam… Who knows, maybe Valve taught EA some lessons on how to make a proper game launcher.
