Origin Gets Social Challenges and Achievement Sharing

Video game publisher has sent Peter Moore, its leading digital distribution evangelist and chief operations officer, to the stage at Gamescom 2012 press conference to talk about the long-term vision it has for its Origin service.

The company has not offered a laundry list of tweaks and updates but talked about how free-to-play titles, sharing for Achievements and social-powered challenges will make the service more attractive to players and will give them a chance to spend more time with it.

The Origin client will also expand its own reach, moving to the Mac, Android and social platform Facebook.

Peter Moore also detailed the current state of the service, which has more than 500 titles available from 50 companies and a user base of no less than 21 million users.

Its main competitor is Steam’s Valve, which still has larger number of gamers using it and will likely maintain its lead in the coming years.