DeMartini: Origin to be a better version of Steam
David DeMartini, EA's senior vice president of global ecommerce, said the goal of EA's Origin service is to be a better version of its competition. DeMartini noted that "the only way you get to the innovation is to have other people try and do a better version of what someone has previously done," singling out Valve's Steam platform in an interview with MCV.
"I didn't expect to be able to out-feature Steam within the first 12 months. But I'm quite optimistic we will differentiate ourselves as a service. We've built the foundation and now we are starting to add value to the service off of that foundation," he added.
DeMartini drew comparisons to social networking platforms when talking about innovation in the digital distribution space. "If MySpace had stayed the one answer in social networking and no one switched to Facebook, then we'd all be stuck on MySpace right now and we wouldn't have had the Facebook phenomenon," he said.
Don't expect Origin to start running huge mark-down sales like Steam does though, as DeMartini recently criticized the massive sales practice.
