I don't know, I begin to wonder what sort of reaction such an excuse would have with EA's shareholders. They are, after all, legally obligated to make as big of a return as possible. Leaving possible tens of thousand to hundreds of thousand of sales on the table because of such petty reasons (I bet they could reconciliate with Valve if they wished, if that story is true.) seems like exactly the kind of thing a publicly traded company SHOULDN'T be doing, no?
The biggest problem is that they're EA. I'm sure the shareholders decided that they could make a larger profit by creating Origin, and...they're right. If EA were a smaller company this wouldn't be an issue at all. But EA is a huge company and they have some of the largest titles in gaming. Sims, Battlefield, Dragon Age, Mass Effect, etc. They can afford to do this and still make a huge profit. I mean when it comes down to it, opinions don't really matter. I highly doubt EA will open up to Steam especially since the profits gained from GW2 will drastically increase once they add micro transactions into the game.
Basically, just don't get your hopes up.
Except my argument hinges on getting more profit after their revenue stream from the game already dries up. It's literally turning down free money in favor of... well, nothing, really.
They haven't done this in the past with Mass Effect 3/Dead Space 3/Battlefield 4/ Sims 4. All signs point to them keeping it as an Origin exclusive but who knows. One thing is for sure, if it does go to Steam (which, again, I wouldn't get my hopes up) it won't be for a long time. And I mean a long time.
I think the difference is those games all had their brands built up on Steam before they went over to Origin, and they're MUCH bigger names than Garden Warfare. You can tell just by looking for a server that GW2 does not command the same kind of playerbase as even Dead Space 3, which was easily the weakest out of those games.
Generally you want to build your brand up and THEN take it away, but that's just me. I'm just really angry that EA cares more about their stupid little inferior platform with missing features than making sure I have a game I can actually play when I want to play it. But EA doesn't care about me. Apparently they don't care about their investors or money, either. That said, it looks like the only thing they care about it petty grudges. Sounds like classic EA.
