In the coming days, we’ll be rolling out a new update to Origin users worldwide--beginning with players who have opted in to beta updates, and going live for everyone else shortly thereafter.

As always, your helpful suggestions and feedback over the past few months have driven many of the changes you’ll see in this new version of Origin. The two most notable additions we’ve made include the ability to quickly and easily broadcast your gameplay live to Twitch, and the ability to add non-Origin games to your My Games library. Together, these two features unlock entirely new dimensions to your gameplay experience on Origin.  Here’s a quick look at what's coming.

Twitch Broadcasting

We’re proud to announce that Origin is partnering with Twitch, and today we’re launching phase one of this integration. With a few clicks of your mouse, you can now broadcast your gaming session live, directly to your Twitch channel, for gamers around the world to view. With the combined power of Origin and Twitch, it’s never been easier to take your own gameplay online, in real-time.

To start broadcasting, just start playing a game, then bring up Origin In Game by hitting Shift+F1 (or whatever keystroke you’ve chosen for your Origin In Game Hotkey). You’ll notice a camera icon has been added to the bottom of this screen. 

Selecting this icon will ask you to sign into your Twitch account (or to create one if you’re not a registered Twitch user). 

After signing in, you’ll see the streaming dashboard where you can start or stop your broadcast, give your stream a name, and adjust volume levels. 

Your stream will be viewable at www.twitch.tv/ [YourTwitchName]. While you're streaming, a broadcast indicator will show up on the top of your screen to let you know how many people are watching your broadcast, and how long you’ve been streaming. Even if you close Origin In Game, the indicator will remain to remind you that you’re broadcasting—and of course, if you don’t want this indicator up all the time, you can just disable it in the settings menu.

The new broadcast tab in the application settings menu will be where you set the defaults for any stream. Here, you can determine broadcast resolution, frame rate, turn off the broadcast indicator, and more.  

As we mentioned earlier, broadcasting your gameplay to Twitch is just the beginning--this feature is still in beta, and we advise you to stay tuned for more Twitch services and functionality in future updates to Origin.

A quick caveat for those of you who are new to streaming: broadcasting your game does take up bandwidth, and it may affect your frame rate. If your gameplay slows considerably while streaming, you may want to either reduce the resolution of your broadcast or look into upgrading your CPU.

Adding Non-Origin Games

Another new feature we’ve implemented is the ability to add games purchased outside of Origin to your My Games library. Now you can launch (and broadcast) all your games from a single convenient location.

To add non-Origin games to your library, just select Add Game from the main menu, select Add Games Manually, and pick the titles you would like to add. After making the selection, a shortcut to that game will appear in your My Games library. Right-clicking on that shortcut and selecting “Shortcut properties” will let you change the name and location of that game, and allow you to add any command line arguments (for example, adding “-console” to enable the console command) to your shortcut.

Additional Upgrades

Adding non-Origin games to your library and integrating Twitch are the two big features in this release, but we’ve made a number of optimizations and small tweaks to the client as well. Your Friends List should now load faster and feel more responsive; we’ve also implemented a change that will let you stretch the Friends List horizontally to accommodate long IDs, status updates, and real names. Right-clicking on Origin in your task bar will now display more options, like recently played games. We improved overall client performance to quicken load times at launch and elsewhere. And, we’ve built-in a feedback survey—because we love to hear from you.

To the Origin Community we’d like to say thank you again for all the input and suggestions. We’ve worked hard to develop and improve Origin; we hope you enjoy the changes. And we’re not even close to done (for that matter, we really never will be…). If you’ve got as feature you would like to see added to upcoming versions of Origin, please leave us a comment below.