I decided I wanted to redeem my copy of spore I lost a while ago when i reformatted my hard drive, (it was a download copy). After some wrangling with E.A customer services, I've been directed to use their origin service and redeem it using my registration key, I will report back with my experiences and how it compares to steam.
EDIT: This failed. I learned some things about the service though, one being; if your EA account password is in the wrong format for the origin client it won't let you log on, at least until you've reset it and changed it to something it'll recognise. I eventually did this and logged in, only then to find out that i can't activate my game with it (despite being told to activate it on origin by EA customer service). I also learnt that spore is £10 cheaper on the origin store than on steam. The actual program works quite well however, even if it does work in a very similar way to steam an is just for EA's games.
