That was the case in 2004, yes, but now people look forward to getting their games on Steam. The value added by the Steam client is enough to get people to choose games on the Steam platform, as opposed to direct downloads from Amazon or the developer-- in fact, most of those come with optional Steam keys anyways because loading your purchased game into the Steam system is worthwhile enough to do in and of itself. I think the most telling point here is that Valve has only had a handful of it's own games drop-- Portal, HL, L4D, CS, and TF2 are the 5 that come to mind, and that's over 9 years-- compared to the number of IPs that EA binds to Origin, and yet people still choose to load their 3rd-party games into the Steam client.

Origin, on the other hand, is coming into the market as an underdog entry from a hated company with a history of decommissioning game's DRM and multiplayer servers within a couple years of the game's release. While they've only had 2 years in the market to Steam's near-decade, unless Origin manages to come up with significantly more value added to the client itself, their IP is going to be their sole draw.

Valve has since proven itself, though. EA has done the opposite. If Valve disappointed people as consistently as EA does, people would still hate Steam — but instead Valve has made it the most unobtrusive DRM scheme known to man.

I think they aren't very happy today, too. I believe the registration itself is bad customer experience, be it with Origin, U-play or Steam.

I've bough^W licensed a DRM-encumbered game. Well, that happens. Just silently create me a nameless account behind the scenes without bothering me with forms and whatever. Tie it to PC and in case of reinstalls or multiple devices let me authenticate by entering CD key or whatever proof-of-purchase's available and then ask to create a password.

Meanwhile, just lure me to social hub or store with a menu option(s). If I'll find the service useful, I'll eventually fill out the details. If I won't - no reason to care about me anyway, as I won't use the service I don't like unless it's really enforced upon.

Nope. Got a game, but have to fill out forms. They want an email confirmation, secret question, obligatory CAPTCHA, cumbersome launcher software and whatever.

I think the disconnect there is that Half Life 2 was a superb achievement in gaming, and worth the investment of dealing with Steam (arguably, Counter-Strike 1.6 started the Steam train, though, and Team Fortress 2 keeps it chugging). If EA gave us a Half Life 2 of its own that required Origin, they might pull it off.

I can't think of one, which is telling. SimCity had the potential to be and, well, wasn't.

The title that required me to install Origin first was Battlefield 3 and thats a pretty awesome game by every measure, if you are into these kind of big budget military shooters that is.

I wouldn't have cared about Origin if it wasn't for a few provisions in their licensing agreement that made me very nervous. In particular the bits about letting them scan your whole hard drive (Steam's only lets them scan the folders it writes to) and the provision they added about "You can't sue us, but we can sue you." While other services have the latter one, having it in conjunction with the former really gave me a huge big brother vibe. I wouldn't have used it with the first one anyway as that's intrusive enough, but the second just made it worse.

Source:

For the claim about Origin's license letting it scan your whole hard drive: http://www.nerdbuster.com/2011/09/eas-origin-wants-to-scan-y... http://www.gamespot.com/news/ea-origin-eula-sparks-privacy-c...

For the second claim about the one way copyright lawsuit provision: Chapter 17, section A can be found here: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&...

In it, they specifically say that the exemptions from this non-lawsuit clause are related to copyright (big claims) and small claims court. Since most users aren't likely to own copyright or patents, I call that stacking the deck of available actions.

Actually I still dislike Steam and avoid that too. Generally I will buy a non-steam version of a game if it is available. I don't want my computer to take longer to boot up or to run slower in case I want to play a game so I don't have Steam set to start automatically.

This means that if I want to play a Steam game (I have a couple like Portal) I must first wait for Steam to open up, get internet, log in (oh so slowly) and finally it will think about opening my game. However undoubtedly there's been an update and so steam will decide to install this first. All in all I'm bored by the time the Valve logo pops up and the actual game can start loading. Or you know, I could just pirate the game and it would open straight away without the need for Steam.

So in short, Steam is also horrible and forced. But at least they make better games and have something like customer support.