Valve's Newell: Origin has a lot of catching up to do

Valve head Gabe Newell has revealed his thoughts regarding EA's Origin platform, stating that he hopes EA changes its mind and brings its Origin-exclusive titles back to Steam. EA launched its own digital distribution platform last year, and soon afterwards began to remove its games from Valve's Steam service, signalling the company's desire to compete with Valve. Talking on a podcast with Seven Day Cooldown, Newell said of Origin, "I don't think they're doing anything super-well yet." "They have a bunch of smart people working on it but I think they're still playing catch up to a lot of people who have been working in the space for a while. I think they're recognising what the challenges are with building and scaling out this kind of system." He continued, "That's not to say they won't build stuff in the future that is useful to software developers or to gamers but they haven't done that yet." Newell admitted that Valve would still "love to have [EA's] games on Steam," and said that EA needs to realize that "whatever they're trying to do to create value for their customers is not a zero sum game." "I think EA wants to take their shot at building their own alternative to Steam, and if they're successful at that and their customers like that then that's great," he said. "We think their customers would be happy if their games were on Steam. We tell them that on a regular basis." However, he continued, "As we learn about this stuff we're all going to be making things better for other gamers. Tim Sweeney [Epic Games founder] doesn't look at Steam and say 'we shouldn't support that because that will hurt long term sales of the Unreal Engine'. He's like, 'that's pretty cool, that's pretty useful'. So hopefully EA get their head to the same place."