EA's Origin service has been through its share of controversies, but it's already made some significant progress. EA CFO Eric Brown says the client has hit 4 million installs so far, and the company expects "substantially" more this holiday season. He also claimed we'll be seeing third-party content coming to Origin "very soon."

"We're fairly excited about Origin," Brown said at a UBS conference in London, reported by Gamasutra. "We have about 4 million installs of the client, we expect that number to climb substantially as we enter this ... holiday season." That claim makes sense, of course. Many EA PC games use Origin as a default client already, and the prospects for an uptick this holiday season are no-doubt fueled by the Origin requirement for marquee titles like Battlefield 3.

That's not all that EA has planned for the service, though. One major difference between Origin and its competitors is third-party content, which EA hopes to remedy soon. "Initially, Origin is set up to deliver EA games, but very soon, we'll be delivering third-party content to Origin," Brown said.

Brown says EA will tout its more than 130 million registered users, payment methods, and other infrastructure features to attract other companies. He didn't specify which games are first on the block, but building a robust selection will go a long way towards putting it on-par with the biggest of its competitors, Steam. And Origin certainly has a lot to do, if it wants to reach the kind of activity seen on Steam, which averages about 3 million concurrent online users at any given time.