EA To Provide Free Distribution To Kickstarter Games 120
New submitter The God of Code writes "EA has announced that they will be waiving all Origin distribution fees for crowd-funded games — like those from Kickstarter — for the first 90 days. 'The public support for crowd-funding creative game ideas coming from small developers today is nothing short of phenomenal,' Origin VP David DeMartini commented. 'It's also incredibly healthy for the gaming industry. Gamers around the world deserve a chance to play every great new game, and by waiving distribution fees on Origin we can help make that a reality for successfully crowd-funded developers.' The recently funded Wasteland 2 developer Brian Fargo applauds EA's move, saying, 'Having Origin waive their distribution fees for 90 days for fan funded games is a major economic bonus for small developers. We look forward to bringing Wasteland 2 to the Origin audience.'"
Translation (Score:5, Insightful)
"Oh shit! There are about to be a metric shit-ton of big budget games by people who have been in the industry for years and know what works and what doesn't and we won't be seeing a shiny dime from them. Over the same period we have been pissing off our customers with our crazier and crazier RDM schemes, we need to stay relevent!"
What's the point? (Score:3, Insightful)
What's the point of Origin? Why not just set up a shopping cart on your website and offer direct downloads?
Re:You'd think (Score:4, Insightful)
Go away astroturfer scum
Re:You'd think (Score:5, Insightful)
Have they dropped their obnoxious DRM yet?
Re:You'd think (Score:5, Insightful)
So long as it's not sold exclusively through Origin, I don't see a problem.
bend over, first "hit" is free (Score:3, Insightful)
Bend over and take my ughhhh snugg ugggghhhh drm ladden load of malware tracking. that's it baby right there. stop complaining about the pain. In 90 days I'll give you something to complain about. Right now it's free. Stop crying. You know you want it.
Re:Origin (Score:4, Insightful)
This would be the most inane astroturfer ever. "It would be nice if more distribution platforms would start supporting OS X."
Re:TRAP! (Score:2, Insightful)
Agreed. Kingdom of Amalur is a great example of a game that could have been great, but was tainted by EA and ruined the company. Kickstarter is good for exactly the same reasons EA isn't.
Re:Origin (Score:5, Insightful)
EA isn't offering to lend a hand. They're trying to woo popular indie projects to them, because they see that almost every single one advertisers in their campaigns that they *are* going with Steam.
This is EA saying "WE ARE RELEVANT, TOO!".
Re:Origin (Score:5, Insightful)
The privacy policy does matter, as the 'legally binding document' dictates that the privacy policy trumps the EULA.
Then why put it in the eula? Seriously. Given the community is fairly upset about it, why not just remove it?
If you're not cool with that, don't use the service, that's opting-out. Get your games from Steam, or buy a console.
I don't buy "Origin" games. However, I think its perfectly legitimate for me to tell them as loudly as I like why I don't buy them, and to advocate others not buy them as well.
But a company saying "we want to know what hardware people have, and what installation/uninstallation problems they have and what background processes may be running that will b0rk our shit, and you need to tell us that in order to use our service" isn't worth raising a fuss over.
It is to me. There are all kinds of abusive things they can do with the information that fall short of selling it. And more to the point, I don't really care what they do with it; I don't think its any of their damned business.
Microsoft asks for permission to send an error report, and I can turn that off without any issue. If Microsoft made it a condition of using their operating system that they got to collect this information, there would be huge lawsuits. And lets be honest here... microsoft has at least as much, if not more of a legitimate need for this data. But they have decency to ask for it, and respect the wishes of users who say "no".
EA doesn't.
I run it under a different user account and lock it out of anywhere I don't think it needs to be.
Then perhaps you should be posting the links to sandboxing origin's client rather than links claiming Origin is a "non-story", because I don't have any software on my PC that I've felt compelled to sandbox to that degree just to retain some that level of control over my own privacy from the vendor.