Update: EA’s offered up a clarifying statement on the matter. Apparently it was a test:
“A few of you noticed some of your older EA games showing up in your Origin My Games library over the past few weeks and I wanted to clear up any confusion. We tested a feature that in some cases made your older games show up in your Origin My Games Library. At no time was any information on your computer accessed, all of this information was obtained directly from our game registration records. Hopefully we didn’t cause too much confusion for anyone. We’ll be sure to come back and share more information about this feature as soon as we can.
“Meanwhile, if you do want to activate and download older EA games to your library, we have a tool that allows you to do this. Just go to https://www.origin.com/activate and enter your registration code. Not all games are supported at this point, but we’re continually working to make older titles available. For more information on this service, as well as a list of games that are currently available for activation, see: https://help.ea.com/article/”
Original story: Here’s a welcome, but possibly an unexpected, surprise. EA’s Origin service has been adding titles bought from other retailers to its user accounts.
Let’s say you bought some Dead Space or Mass Effect games from Steam; don’t be too surprised if you also find the games present on your Origin account all of the sudden. That’s exactly what appears to be happening, according to a forum post on Day One Patch (via).
This is apparently achieved by Origin’s ability to read file names on your computer. Personal info isn’t transferred, though.
So, quite handy for those nudging towards Origin for whatever reason.
