When it was first announced, people asked a very basic question of EA’s Origin Access program: if you weren’t a big fan of FIFA or Battlefield, what was there? But month by month, the program has grown to include a range of blockbusters and indies from outside of EA’s patch.
The latest titles, for instance, have pretty much bugger all to do with EA. They’re not even really the kinds of games that EA tends to publish these days, with the company announcing that Torment: Tides of Numenera and Pillars of Eternity would be joining the PC-only version of EA’s monthly subscription service.
The full set of games is as follows:
Mad Max
Pillars of Eternity: Hero Edition
Prison Architect
Torment: Tides of Numenera
Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons
Virginia
Ember
Spore
Sitting at just under 100, the amount of games in EA’s Origin Access program are largely what you’d expect from the company’s back catalogue: old Wing Commander games, Populous, the Ultima series, The Sims and so on. But the program has slowly picked up a range of interesting indies to go with it, including Pony Island, Hacknet, the Batman Arkham games, Wasteland 2, Orwell, Torchlight and Rebel Galaxy.
It’s almost reaching that critical mass where the $6.99 a month / $39.99 a year access fee is genuinely better value than, say, buying a new Battlefield or Need for Speed outright. Hell, if EA somehow made the old Need for Speed: Underground games available through the program, I’d probably sign up in a heartbeat.
Because as programs as this grow year after year, and people’s piles of shame grow in kind, it begs asking whether signing up to the growing subscription services isn’t better value than buying a bunch of games every sale, only to leave them untouched in my Steam library.
For a quick scroll of all the games in Origin Access so far, see the full list here.
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