EA's Peter Moore Defends Origin in Front of Heckler

Electronic Arts' newly appointed Chief Operating Officer, Peter Moore, was faced at a press conference in Sydney with a heckler that criticized the company's recently released Origin digital distribution service, so he defended it with a variety of arguments.

EA's Origin was released earlier this year onto the web, effectively replacing the already existent EA Online Game Store, and offering a variety of new features, much in the vein of Valve's own Steam digital distribution service.

Sadly for EA, gamers weren't exactly happy to use Origin, and the fact that upcoming titles like Battlefield 3 require Origin on the PC made it even more hard to love the service.

As such, EA's COO, Peter Moore, was tasked with defending it when faced with a vocal critic of the service, during a recent public appearance.

"The heckle was about Origin, which is our platform for social, community-based interaction with our fans, delivering games directly to their computers, allowing you to see what your friends are playing at any given time and allowing you to communicate with them.

"And like any piece of software, and I worked at Microsoft for enough years to say this, you launch software and continue to polish it, upgrade it, get feedback and make it better. That's where we are with Origin," he continued. "We're only four and a half months in and already over five million people are using it on a daily basis."

Moore then highlighted that the service will continue to evolve, so in just a couple of years, it's going to be a great complement to the actual interactive entertainment delivered by video games, although he admits it's going to take some time before actual gamers realize this.

"As I said to the young man who shouted at me, I think two years from now we'll be back down here in Australia and talking about how it really enhances and complements the gaming experience, not gets in the way of it, which I think some people do believe right now. The console first parties understand what we are doing. I think the fans, the people that have to use it in the early going, are the ones that get it last in regards to what we are trying to do."

While gamers aren't too thrilled with Origin, it seems that EA really wants to improve it, so let's hope things turn out better in the future.