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Some player accounts are finding EA purchases made at retail or on Steam available on Origin.

Gamers who use Steam or who purchased a game by Electronic Arts in the past two years might want to check Origin to see what games the service says you own. Reports from G4 earlier today are indicating that some games are available to play through the Origin service if they were bought elsewhere. EA confirmed this, with some provisions and clarity.

Originally, it was thought to be just games purchased on Steam. If you enter the product key (which most Steam games provide) into Origin, you can then access that game using the Origin service. Some users are reporting that Steam still opens when you open one of these titles through Origin, but it seems like you can independently download these games through Origin and eliminate that.

Not all games seem to work, as both Crysis and Bulletstorm product keys failed to be recognized, but Dead Space 2 and Dragon Age: Origins have been confirmed to work. EA states that this is being done as a test to pull info from game registration records, but don't worry, no personal data on home computers was accessed in order to do this. The official statement reads as follows:

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 http://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/