Anyone else find it really hard to believe that origin only has 10million less members then steam..
Well the article said Steam clocked 50m 6 months ago so presumably their userbase is slightly higher now as well.
Personally I don't find it hard to believe since:
-Origin ported over all the EADM users
-EADM used to have decent games completely free which would get users signing up e.g. in 2009/10 you could Mirror's Edge, Dead Space and Mercenaries 2 for free, Burnout Paradise was free etc
-Cokezone vouchers used to be a bit buggy with min spend not working properly so again you could get £9.99 games for free using a £10 voucher - in combination with the above I used to have an account for ages even before I'd actually given them any money
-Even when that was solved cokezone still used to be a reasonable deal i.e. when they had a sale on you could then get another £10 off a £25 spend
-There are some pretty big games that require Origin i.e. BF3, FIFA, ME3 etc
What you have to remember when it comes to user base is that you do NOT need a good service, you do NOT need lots of good games, you do NOT need a good community etc - all you need is one single reason to get users to sign up. So all you need is ONE game that a user wants/needs to have on your service - for me and many others that dates back to when you could get games for free. For others it will down to e.g. BF3.
The concurrent users is a much more meaningful stat (looking at average users, or users logged in the past x days would be nice too) and Steam seems to be far ahead in that department. Personally while I have Origin sometimes I go a few weeks without loading it, especially as some of my Origin games can be launched directly without Origin (Steam 'cheats' by forcing me to have it loaded when playing a Steam game).