You may have seen that Sim City is coming out in a new model next year, and yesterday I received an email from them offering me £40 off other purchases if I pre-order.

They offered a nice link:
http://store.origin.com/store/eaemea/en ... l990581347

With the lovely prices between £44.99 - £64.99 - they are kidding right?

Where Steam offers direct reductions or free items for pre-orders, Origin just offer money off more of their crap.

I want to play Sim City as I have nearly grown-up with it, but this all stinks.

*rant over*

One of the many reasons I don't play BF3 any more is this POS software. Besides the fact it's a terrible downloader (it hangs on 100% and apparently you have to go in and change the file names for it to continue, because they're the wrong ones), the damn thing for some reason won't shut down, and prevents me from shutting down my PC properly.

Having had a look, it's a problem that's been afflicting people since its release. No-one has any ideas how to fix it.

It worked before, now it does not. I haven't got a clue why. So I just got rid of it.

Speaking of tits, EA's facebook page got hacked and people spammed hentai pictures all over it.

EA is the source of 95% (rough estimation, could be higher) of everything that is evil and unholy in the gaming industry; that's pretty much an established law by now.

I had totally forgotten that they own all the Sim stuff. I was looking forward to a new Sim City - not so much now.

Repost but topical.

Was expecting that in the first post agent lol.

I despise how EA treat customers but I'm not gonna lie, i love their sports / racing games because they actually do a pretty good job on them, but everything else they touch gets ruined, like BF3 (although i still enjoy the game).

Origin itself, honestly the I've not got any real problems with it at all, It's not perfect but neither was steam when it first came out, it's simply serviceable, it's just OK as far as I'm concerned (EA Download manager was a million times worse than Origin so it's a step in the right direction).

No my issue with origin is that it's completely uncalled for but yet it's forced upon you if you want to play certain games. Steam is the finished article and i have everything else on there. If i had a choice of steam or origin BF3 i would have chosen steam all day every day. Forcing origin upon people does not make people like it.

Don't like it, don't use it.

It didn't get hacked. 9gag muppets were just tagging EA in photos.

It's not like there's a need for us gamers to have an alternative to steam, it works perfectly well. And since it works, EA is the one with the need to enter in this kind of "competition"... you know... for the bling bling

They can't do huge promotions nor make games a fair price since they still have a small amount of players using Origin. With exclusives like BF3, etc and more games coming they might end up either getting more players to that small sample they have or make the few they have leave.

So far, i think is going the second way around so i give it 2 years max to go bankrupt or whatever happens to this kind of business

In order to be competitive against Steam they need competitive prices. Your argument is invalid as it implies that it's the player bases' fault the prices are so high when it is not the case.

EA has chosen their competitive strategy and priced their games deliberately. It has nothing to do with the size of their customer base, it's a deliberate pricing strategy. Supply and demand does not exist on digital orders; you can't run out of stock of data. They can price their games according to demand, yes, which is most likely the case. Look at the pricing of COD compared to other, similar and better, games.

Origin having exclusivity on most EA titles mean they have complete control of the pricing on their games. Hence why they price their games higher than Steam would.