EA Announces Alpha Testing for Origin Client on Macs

[Akshay Masand]

The popular game developer, Electronic Arts, recently announced that users would be able to download and test an early alpha of its popular Origin gaming software for Mac. According to a post on the Origin blog, only a few thousand players in North America and the United Kingdom will be able to download the app at this stage to help test it out. The following was announced by EA:

Mac gamers rejoice: Origin for Mac will be launching soon, and starting today we’re offering you the opportunity to take it for a spin before the official release. This open alpha will only be available to a few thousand users in North America and the United Kingdom, so don’t wait—download your copy of our new Mac client (alpha build) today.

The developer is giving each alpha tester a free copy of the PopCap game, Bookworm. Since the store isn’t fully functional in the Mac version, new games won’t be able to download at this time. It’ll be a while before we start seeing games like Mass Effect and Dead Space running natively on the Mac as EA’s development teams has to specifically build the Mac version of each game in order for them to work on OS X.

The decision on whether to create a Mac version of the game or not though relies on the individual game’s developers. It’s likely that all the hot-selling games will likely be seeing a Mac version but the same can’t be said about some of the less known games. Most other Origin features such as the in-game overlay, chat, and cloud saves will be fully functional in the alpha from day one.

Those of you who are interested in trying the alpha client will need OS X 10.6.8 or higher and the client, which can be downloaded from the Origin website.

Source: Origin (blog)

[Scotty Manley Silberhorn]

10.8.6?!? Am I missing 4 updates for osx? Or is ea just trolling us?

[Caspercronz]

10.8.6?!? Am I missing 4 updates for osx? Or is ea just trolling us?

its 10.6.8 silly which is snow leopard u just read it wrong

[Scotty Manley Silberhorn]

its 10.6.8 silly which is snow leopard u just read it wrong

haha they changed it then. it did say 10.8.6 first