Electronic Arts are now turning towards the online retail/delivery concept.

For many of us, the experience with Steam has been largely good, although not without complaint. The same could be said for Direct2Drive. Now EA are primed to invigorate their EA Downloader service and get in the game. It's possible there are still a few people out there who don't mind EA, maybe even actually like them, but for many their experience will have soured them.

As I said, there is a few complaints with Steam:

• It seems to take a long time to start and log on, for no obvious reason because you have an 8Mb connection.
• It's forever downloading...something. It's not clear what as the update news for all your games show they haven't been patched in 6 months.
• If you don't want it sitting in the tray, Steam has to launch with every steam game, which is quite a nuisance when combined with the above points
• Lets face it, a lot of the games on Steam are rubbish; just there to pad out the list.
• There are some genuine complaints for episodic gaming, something which Steam not only makes a reality, but encourages.

Imagine what EA, with their midas touch of crap, could do with that? On top of that, they plan to start peddling hacks and cheats. As they said at ars

Obviously we're all missing the whole point of playing games here. Thank god EA is here to show us.

ars technica reports.