Image courtesy of Game Revolution
Electronic Arts has been steadily expanding the breadth of its Origin service since originally being marketed as an isolated platform. After their successful negotiation of several distribution deals with major outside publishers, the industry giant is now reportedly in talks with Nintendo to be the sole online hosting platform for the Wii U. In a report from Wii U Go, an anonymous source – identified as an intern at EA – the company has been in talks with Nintendo in attempts to woo exclusivity away from other digital distribution platforms like Steam.
According to the source, Nintendo views the deal as “as an opportunity to rebuild relationships with Western gamers because they feel that only a massive western company such as EA understands what is needed to make an online service attractive to western gamers.” While Electronic Arts has been “aggressively persuading Nintendo to go Origins exclusive with Wii U’s online so they can gain a competitive advantage over Steam.”
Neither Nintendo nor Electronic Arts could be reached for comment on the story.
(via IndustryGamers)
Would this be a deal you’d like to see come to fruition? What kind of effect could this have on EA’s digital distribution market share, or Nintendo’s online support? Comment below!
As much as Nintendo needs to improve their infrastructure, Origin is not the service I would want to run all my games. With the TOS that allows them to delete your profile and/or delete your games if you are inactive on that account, I don’t want to support EA’s endeavors with Origin.
Now if EA and Valve are just helping Nintendo build a better online, then that is fine. Though having Steam support on the WiiU would be awesome (well all consoles, cause cross platform gaming is awesome).
I think so aswell, and I’ve always wanted ‘cross platform’ games ever since the PS2, xbox and gamecube days(and there wasn’t even any pathetic ‘fanboy’ stuff back then either =/).
I miss the good old days.
Back when I was playing the 360 alot I had this game called Shadowrun which I loved but wasn’t very popular especially on PC, mainly because PC players had to have Vista (it was the start of the Games for Windows thing) but it was cool, sadly because it didn’t do that well microsoft ended the developer Fasa studios.
Then Valve did it with Portal 2 and I know alot of people(couple of friends aswell) loved it, are you paying attention developers? =)