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EA Confirms More Exclusives Coming For Origin Service

by Adam Cook on June 15, 2011

Strap yourselves in people, this could be a bumpy ride.

Remember during E3, where Electronic Arts unveiled their new digitial service, called Origin? Well, today they have confirmed that they will be bringing more exclusives to the service, as well as value-added unique content to the versions available via Origin.

“We are going to continue to be great partners for our retail channel partners as they evolve their business models to account for digital,” Frank Gibeau, president of EA Games, told GamesIndustry.biz. “But at the same time you talk about platform exclusives like Halo or Uncharted, EA’s going to have some of our own platform exclusives.”

Having already confirmed the digital version of Star Wars: The Old Republic to be exclusive to Origin, and having removed Crysis 2 from Steam, it doesn’t seem likely that this is something they are taking lightly.

“In the case of Star Wars we’re trying to build an audience for Origin. And it’s also an opportunity for us to better manage the downloads and how we bring people over from the beta and that sort of thing. For a lot of reasons it made sense for an MMO, which is a highly complex deployment. I think long-term you’ll see we believe in reach so we will have other digital retailers for out products because we want to reach as many audiences as possible. But at the same time if we can use exclusive content or other ideas to help grow our audience then we’re going to do that because we’re growing a platform,” added Gibeau.

Quick to dismiss the idea that it is purely a money-making scheme, Gibeau goes on to explain that the service is about more than that:

“We’re the worldwide leader in packaged goods publishing, we’d like to be the worldwide leader in digital publishing. And we think that EA has unique strengths there related to what we can do with our content, because we’re a content creator as well as a retailer in this business. But in general it’s not just a retail site, it’s a community, it’s a platform, it has traits much like you see with Steam or PSN or Xbox LIVE, but it’s unique to EA”.

What do you think of this? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below, or over on our forums in this thread!