EA App Feedback After Switching From Origin
Not that Origin ever was a technological marvel, yet somehow you still managed to lower the bar. Instead of focusing so much on patching the Origin workarounds, maybe you should reflect for a second on why so many people are so reluctant to switching over. Here is a hint: it's not because of nostalgia or fear of change.
For my use case this "new" (using quotation marks because this launcher has been out since 2020) EA App only manages to offer a worse experience than Origin. What's my use case, you might ask? Get this: playing the EA games I paid for. Quite a novel concept, I know.
All this launcher seems to excel at is spamming The Sims and EA Play ads. Case in point, I keep getting random popups on my desktop about game deals I couldn't care less about, and every now and then I get a warning message telling me that my EA Play subscription has expired, even though I never subscribed to EA Play in the first place, and I assure you I never will.
I'm not sure how in over three years you guys couldn't figure out what makes the EA App objectively inferior to Origin, but here are two obvious bad design elements I noticed within my first minute of use:
- Launching games takes more clicks than before. With Origin you could just right click on the tray icon to launch your recent games, the EA App doesn't offer this functionality. I suppose this is by design so users have to go through the Home page every time and get their daily dose of ads before playing.
- Launching games is measurably slower, because of forced Cloud Saves. The Cloud Saves functionality is nothing but a waste of time for certain games; allow us to toggle it off or even on a per-games basis—you know, something that was possible in Origin.
Also here are some miscellaneous complaints:
- I don't need to be reminded every session that the launcher is minimized when I minimize it.
- Changes to settings don't stick through reboots half the time.
- The Roadmap Trello board is barebones and not kept up-to-date, which is on-brand considering the Known Issues list here on Answers HQ hasn't been updated in nine months. Also the FAQ is about the "EA Desktop Beta"; for your info it's no longer called "EA Desktop" and (allegedly) it's no longer in Beta either.
- Cannot change status from the tray icon.
- All installed games are now gone after having launched the EA App without an Internet connection. Definitely a well designed piece of software ready to hit production.
- The friend list collapsing on its own is annoying and completely unnecessary. I mean, for crying out loud the minimum window size for this damn thing is about 1000x700 pixels and you can't even fit a proper friend list in that? Consider sacrificing some space from the The Sims ads in favor of basic functionality.
In conclusion, the EA App is bad and you should feel bad.
Thank you for your time.
(cm edit - updating thread for tracking)
