A new post from Electronic Arts (EA) with the inauspicious title "Update your operating system for the EA App" tolls the final bell on the ill-fated Origin platform, and may be very bad news for a small subset of gamers. It's been a bit of a road to get here, but you'll see why in a moment: EA first announced that Origin would be replaced by the "EA Desktop App" in 2020, then things went quiet until October 2022 saw the more svelte "EA App" move into open beta.
The EA App has subsequently established itself as one of the least-bad attempts at these things from a major publisher. But Origin remained running alongside it, because it was a client running on 32-bit desktop software, and the EA App requires a 64-bit version of Windows. Microsoft announced back in 2020 that future versions of Windows 10 would no longer support 32-bit systems, a move that some thought was long-overdue, while others feared it would leave their older machines obsolete. Five years down the line, that decision is about to bite down hard.
