Good news for Xbox 360 owners: Skyrim's Dawnguard expansion pack is now available for download on the marketplace for 1600 MS points. Hopefully all goes well, but Bethesda is notorious for buggy launches, so it might behoove you to proceed with caution.
For any anxious PC owners who have to wait, there's a bright side: The Mass Effect 3 Apology Extended Cut DLC is also available on Origin, free of charge.
The next installment of SimCity won't be available exclusively on EA's Origin service, the company has announced. EA says the city-building game will be sold on other digital distribution platforms and at retail stores, although a complete list hasn't been announced yet.
The bad news is that players will still have to be logged in to Origin to play the game, ostensibly because every SimCity player will influence the regional and global economies in the game's simulated world.
[joystiq]
EA's digital game distribution service, Origin, has taken a lot of criticism from the gaming community, but Minecraft creator Markus "Notch" Persson thinks it's ultimately a good thing -- if only to avoid a monopoly by Valve's Steam.
"I think it's a bit dangerous to only have one digital distribution platform like Steam," he said. "I love Valve, but out of principle, I find the idea of one platform a bit scary. So I like that there are others competing," he said in an interview with GameSpy.
That doesn't mean he thinks Origin is a great product, though.
"Origin does a couple things badly compared to Steam," Notch said, "which is impressive since they had eight years to study Steam.
Origin currently has 9.3 million users, with 1 million active each day -- versus Steam's user base of 35 million - but it racked up many of those users by forcing them to sign up to play any EA game. That's a practice Notch thinks EA should drop if it wants to challenge Steam.
"They should definitely have a chance to do their thing, but they might want to move away from titles that make people use it and show people why they should use it," he said.
[escapist]
