14 DAY TRIAL // Gabe Newell, the boss of Valve, the studio behind franchises like Portal or Half-Life, not to mention the massively popular Steam Digital distribution service, has shared his thoughts on the new Origin service set up by Electronic Arts.
Steam is without a doubt the most popular digital distribution service on the PC platform, managing to offer a huge variety of games and providing great features and support, including the Steamworks suite, which allows titles to upload save games to the Steam cloud while using the service as an anti-piracy solution.
Electronic Arts has decided to compete against Valve recently, by releasing its own digital distribution service, Origin, currently offering just titles made by EA.
Valve's Gabe Newell has tried out the service and shared his thoughts with PC Gamer magazine, via CVG.
"I think it does some things well. I think there are still some areas where, as a customer, I'd like to see it improve. It's not that different from any other system like this. There are positive things and negative things."
As you can imagine, Newell and his team are focusing just on Steam, and want to continue improving and making changes to the service in order to stay ahead of the competition, including EA.
"I and everyone at Valve know that you're only as successful as what you've done lately," he added. "So the idea that Steam is somehow the answer to digital distribution ignores the fact that every two or three years, something is going to change dramatically."
Newell emphasized recently that the current version of Steam will look positively ancient five years from now, highlighting that the industry is changing rapidly, so digital distribution services need to do that as well, if they hope to attract and keep new customers.
Nvidia also predicted last week that PC gaming will overtake consoles by 2014, largely because of the popularity of digital distribution.