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.
Well...on the PC. Which as I understand has the lowest player base out of all three consoles. And Plants vs Zombies is a massive brand. That doesn't suddenly become any less true just because it's a spin off. And whilst I'm at, EA's profits have definitely gone UP because of their decision. Valve takes (roughly) 30% from all sales. Considering the success of those games and of Garden Warfare which is a massive brand.
Also what mode were you trying to play? Garden/Graveyard Ops? Because I've seen plenty of PC footage of the other multiplayer modes and there's no big issue there.
And the revenue WON'T dry up. They will only sell more copies as time goes on. People will get over their dislike of Origin and buy the game if they really want to play. And even if they don't, (They will) in a few months or so they're almost definitely going to add microtransactions into the game and as long as you have people who enjoy the game on PC they'll buy them.
People will get over their dislike of Origin? Uhhh, what? Origin sales lately have been pretty flat. What EA needs to understand here is that they're not the big boys in town any longer. There's no game drought, there's a constant flood of amazing games and they're just not competing on PC. It doesn't matter if you like gaming on PC or not, you could literally never buy an EA game and never be hurting for titles to choose from. I've bought like 15 games on Steam in the last month or two, I only got this because I absolutely loved the first. I can typically get several friends to buy a title to play with me, and those I can't I just gift it to them.
I can't do that with Origin, no one gives half a * about my recommendation if it's on Origin. It's not like they're really missing out, there's a million other things to play without switching over to EA's inferior-in-every-way service. Even the "faster downloads" people report are bogus, with EA reporting the "download speed" of the full file size even though it's downloading a compressed file that is much smaller. Can't even report download speeds honestly. That's EA!
In the last several weeks I have purchased on Steam...
Street Fighter V (Incomplete as hell but a blast nonetheless)
Factorio (Freaking incredible)
Stardew Valley (Amazing)
Danganronpa (Not as good as 999 but still utterly fantastic)
SUPERHOT (Fantastic!)
Evertown (Great fun!)
Pony Island (Great game that messes with your expectations!)
Chaos Tower (Silly fun)
Plague Inc Evolved (A blast)
Devil Daggers (Simple and amazing)
NeonXZS (Woo! 6DOF fun!)
XCOM 2 (Buggy as hell but addicting as hell)
The Division (Surprisingly compelling betas that convinced me the game was worth it)
The Witness (No comment needed!)
Firewatch (Loooove this oen)
Rise of the Tomb Raider (Extremely well made and fun)
And that's me cutting out like 6 games. This isn't like 2007 or whatever when I'd be settling for a port of Resident Evil 4 without lighting effects because there was so little to choose from. We are spoiled for choice. And if EA doesn't give half a * about their game having a decent playerbase, why should I try to get my friends in it? I hate how little they respect me as a consumer here. Lobbies are still empty, it's completely depressing as someone who really, REALLY loves this game. But even if I got all my friends to buy it, that wouldn't fill up the servers. This is as full as they're gonna get. It only goes down from here until they have a completely massive sale.
The fact that I care about the success of this game more than EA (from what I can see, at least) is... unreal.
