EA made it official today with the changing of their privacy policies, you will be required to sign up for an Origin account if you want to play EA games online on the Wii U. Section V.3 of the privacy policy stated:
“Information Provided To EA By Third Parties – Wii U, If you sign up to play EA games through a Nintendo Wii U console, your Nintendo account information will be provided to EA so that we can establish an Origin Account for you. You need an Origin Account to play EA’s titles online.
“By signing up to play EA’s titles, you agree that limited user account information can be transferred to EA. Information transferred to EA includes your Mii information, email address, Nintendo Network ID, friend list, country, language and date of birth but does not include credit card number or other financial account information.”
This policy is similar to the one with the Xbox 360 and PS3 where you are required to have an Origin account if you want to play games like Mass Effect 3 online.
This wasn’t unexpected considering they force Xbox 360 and PS3 users to do the same thing. However, EA just seems to want to give people reasons to hate them as they are now giving Nintendo ammunition to hate them as well.
It is becoming more and more difficult for me to justify purchasing EA published games. The way they treat their consumers is despicable and there seems to be no end in sight. I have a feeling it is only a matter of time before EA forces us to sign up for an Origin account to play single player offline games; in fact it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if EA initiated this for the next generation Microsoft and Sony consoles.
Luckily for me there are not very many EA games in production I am looking forward to, Dead Space 3 interests me but I am concerned they may have screwed that franchise up by trying to make it more like Gears of War. Hopefully not but these are the things you have to worry about when EA is publishing your favorite franchises.
