EA have made no secret of their desire to get big name publishers onto their Origin storefront, but now it seems they are after a slice of the indie gaming pie by offering a 90 day waiver of all distribution fees on crowd-funded titles.
Crowd-funding a la Kickstarter is nothing new on the gaming scene—dozens of indie ventures from one man projects like Stardrive, the first efforts of some smaller studios like Xenonauts right up through to the likes of Double Fine’s latest project have found financial support though crowd-funding that they just wouldn’t have been able to secure elsewhere.
But as good as more games on Origin and some favorable publicity is for EA this particular, specific support for crowd-funded games seems like something of an odd fit for them. The much vaunted ‘democratic’ crowd funding process—where consumers encourage development of titles they actually want to buy and developers can secure funding without compromising their vision—seems out of place alongside EA’s much more traditional publishing operation. Frankly the exclusion of indie games funded through other sources makes this feel like a cheap attempt to cash in on some Kickstarter publicity rather than secure any meaningful indie presence on Origin or support smaller developers. It’s almost like EA has an executive somewhere tasked with looking for bandwagons they can be the last to jump on and indie gaming/Kickstarter was their latest master stroke—it would certainly account for the short lived ‘EA indie bundle’ which appeared on Steam earlier this month.
But all that aside, it’s still good to see Origin trying to compete with Steam and Desura in the PC games arena, and it’s definitely good news for developers like inXile Entertainment who plan on bringing their fan funded Wasteland 2 to Origin.
Articles RSS