EA Origin

» see origin.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

i installed origin around 2011 because battlefield 3 would not launch any other way. by then i was a working engineer, ttnet broadband at home, a midrange gaming pc on my desk, steam already accounting for almost every game in my library. origin showed up as the second launcher i was required to have. for many people in turkey that was the first time we had heard of ea's plan to compete with steam.

the client launched on june 3 2011, replacing what had been called ea downloader since 2005. ea wanted what valve already had with steam: a storefront, a friends list, achievements, cloud saves, automatic patching. by 2013 they had 50 million registered users, which sounded big until you noticed that most of those users only opened origin once per game install and then closed it.

origin was the launcher you tolerated. it auto-updated when you did not want it to and ran in the background after you closed the game. it also had a chat client you never used because all your friends were on discord.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

the launch was angry. crysis 2 was pulled from steam in june 2011, days after origin shipped, and ea blamed valve for restrictive terms. valve disagreed publicly. the result was that battlefield 3 came out four months later as an origin-only release, and for nine years stayed exclusive to origin before finally appearing on steam in june 2020.

the eula caused its own storm. the original 2011 origin terms gave ea unusually broad rights to scan the contents of your computer for telemetry purposes. germany's federal data protection commissioner publicly called it spyware. ea rolled the language back within a month, but the reputation never quite recovered.

~ the funny part ~

origin's best feature was the great game guarantee, where you could return any game within 24 hours of play for a full refund. for two years before steam introduced its own refund policy in 2015, origin had the better consumer terms. nobody talked about this because nobody wanted to admit that the launcher they hated had a good idea first.

the second funny part was that the ea app, which replaced origin starting october 2022, was worse on launch than origin had been at end of life. the migration ran with the old and new clients in parallel for two and a half years while ea fixed the new one. by the time origin was actually shut on april 17 2025, most people had forgotten it was still there.

~ what it became ~

the ea app is what replaced it. same library, same account, same battlefield-and-mass-effect catalog, different ui that looks like an electron app from 2020. the origin name lives on only in the urls you find when searching for old patch notes.

what origin proved was that publishers cannot force a launcher into existence on the strength of one exclusive title. for thirteen years ea kept battlefield off steam and kept fifa locked to their own client. people installed it anyway, then uninstalled it the moment the exclusive period ended. origin was a tax you paid to play certain games, never a place you went to discover new ones.

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