EA to bring more exclusives to Origin, not ready to dump D2D and Impulse

EA has confirmed more of its games will be digitally exclusive to its Origin service, and it plans to add unique content to its games so that the titles stand-out more than they would on a competitor's services.

At the same time, EA is not ready to stop releasing games on services such as Direct2Drive and Impulse, because it still needs its games to reach a wide audience.

"We are going to continue to be great partners for our retail channel partners as they evolve their business models to account for digital," said EA games label president Frank Gibeau. "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.

"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."

PC versions of EA titles like Alice: Madness Returns are "only on Origin" according to the official website.

But EA wants to get across the message that Origin is more than a retail site, and will evolve with community features borne from the company's history in games creation.

Gibeau went on to tell GI.biz tha twith Origin, EA wants to become "the worldwide leader in digital publishing," and that the platform will include traits "much like you see with Steam or PSN or Xbox Live."