If their desktop application is ACTUALLY designed for convenience, they have one up on Steam.
It is. Just not the customers. I doubt I'll be buying any games from EA soon either.
What's the last game you bought rom EA anyway? Last game I bought was "Earth & Beyond", which promptly cured me of ever wanting to buy another EA title.Seriously, if it hadn't been for the US sports franchise and "The Sims" EA would have gone bankrupt ages ago.
I wouldn't mind that, what I would mind though is having 50+ stinking "Steam-clone"-clients installed on my system.
You'd have to. Because the opposite is too much like communism. The only alternative is if someone released a standard, opensource program everyone could use that offered everything Steam et al does, but without the propriety tie-in. And I think we'll see world wide communism happen sooner than the commercial embrace of open source software. I think what matters is if games are good they'll sell well.
And yet every day we see so much evidence to the contrary. Excellent games like Sacrifice getting beaten by faux-games like "Who wants to be a millionaire" and "DOOM 3". Marketing too makes a difference but that can be solved.
Marketing is the only thing that makes a difference. You can take a game like F.E.A.R. for instance, that's doesn't even WORK out-of-the-box, and still sell it by the bucketload, because of all the hype about it. I expect things will become a lot more like cable TV, and far more commercial with the indie scene of today falling further into obscurity.
Thinking about it, CableTV is probably the perfect metaphor for gaming of the future.