EA Says Battlefield 3’s Already Sold 5 Million Copies

@YukoAsho said:

@tekmojo said:

@Nightriff said:

@Brendan: Yes I am aware that the game has already been reviewed, Jeff gave it a 4, just was saying I don't care how well a game sells

Jeff didn't review BF3.

Indeed. Who's Dave Snider anyway? He one of the interns?

Eh, old friend of the Jeff, Ryan etc. designer of Giant Bomb, code guru and diehard PC gamer.

@BillyMethers said:

Too bad it's loaded with spyware. People have been complaining all over Amazon about how the PC version (Origin) is scanning all of their files and folders, including folders holding their tax returns. I think that's a complete invasion of privacy and some of them even posted screenshots in the comments.

Seriously, don't let Origin on your computer.

Bullshit. I have Origin on PC and it's no more harmful to my computer than Steam. i.e. not much.

Show us some real screenshots of this "spyware" and proof this shit exists. Otherwise, you're just another anti-Origin fearmongerer.

@tekmojosaid:

@Nightriff said:

@Brendan: Yes I am aware that the game has already been reviewed, Jeff gave it a 4, just was saying I don't care how well a game sells

Jeff didn't review BF3.

Oh sorry, completely my bad, I thought Jeff was doing it from what he was saying during the bombcast last week, my fault for not doing any research

@BillyMethers: no, that is COMPLETE nonsense. Origin does THIS:

Yay. Conspiracies. So let's see what Origin really does, shall we?

If you hook process monitor onto Origin you will not see Origin scanning anything, independently of how long you use it. So what triggered the OP's screenshot?

Origin on installation will try to find games installed on your harddrive and automatically register them within Origin. It does that in a couple of different ways:

1. It reads the windows games registry
2. It looks for games in Program Files
3. It looks for games in ProgramData (where, for unknown reason the OP's SMS and tax software are storing the data instead of the user profile where that data should go!)
4. it reads the xfire config if it finds one for games

If you look at the screenshot closely you will see that it does not actually read any files. Instead it looks for their existence and recursively walks the directory. It does not read any of your files, at least not judging from this screenshot or anything I have found on my machine.

Lastly if you monitor the network traffic that Origin causes you will see that it does not transmit anything of value to EA. So far I have not seen anything bug login credentials being submitted.

But it's always so much more fun to assume that software is inherently evil. You can hook a syscall monitor on any application and you will see that it operates all over the drive. That's not something unique to Origin. Steam will do the same if you click the "add non steam game" button.

//EDIT: something I forgot: I think people should not run any sysinternals tools without a basic understanding of what they do or at least not jump to conclusions.

@DonPixel: hell yes, BF3 deserves all the success and acclaim it is given

$300 million of revenue... I am sure EA and their retailers are quite happy.

@Nightriff said:

Oh sorry, completely my bad, I thought Jeff was doing it from what he was saying during the bombcast last week, my fault for not doing any research

Reading the name of the reviewer or even glancing at the animated representation of the reviewer is "research"?

@Jimbo said:

Hey lil soldier you aint ready for war, C.O.D. too strong for y'all.

Excellent

Glad to see someone doing a beat down on the COD/MW franchise. Though
I've got to say that these types of games are no longer all that interesting for 
me.

also interesting to observe the total player counts for each platform... http://bf3stats.com/
As of this post:

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PC online    182,558
PS3 online   174,328
360 online   241,583