I honestly don't get all the hate for EA these days. They have some of the best franchises in the business at the moment. MoH, BF, Crysis, and mass effect are all great.
I honestly can't think of anything good that Activision has currently. The blizzard stuff is decent, but not my cup of tea. EA's developers are doing more innovation than any of the other dev's out there, but that's just my opinion.
Valve is obviously the best, but they don't release games that frequently.
Ok, lets try and break this down.
EA buys talent and runs it into the ground 99% of the time. They have ruined many excellent franchises that they have bought. While they are a company and aim to make money, they have become extremely short sighted in about it and doing anything and everything to turn a quick profit now instead of looking more long term.
As for their franchises, lets break it down, starting with the ones you named.
MoH, has been run into the ground and they have tried rebooting it once and failed and are trying again. They want it to be CoD sadly and use BF beta's as incentive to preordering/buying it.
BF, great series, not going to argue, but, BF3 is a step down from its predecessor and now with BF4 announced for next year and they want to do leap frog development with a new MoH one year and a BF the next year, they will quickly wear it out most probable.
Crysis, they don't own it, they are just the publishers or maybe pay for some of the development, but Crytek is not owned by EA.
Mass Effect. Good games that got progressively less RPG and more just action and became a DLC milker with the last holding out an important part of the lore for another $10. Bioware was not bought by EA till ME2 was around half way done.
Need for Speed, seriously, do we even need to get into this? This poor series has become so lost that they actually had you get out of the car and run in the last one. Now because they can figure out how to make a good one again, they are taking the best one they made in some time (Most Wanted) and are already remaking it.
Simcity. Ahh how we all love some city building, now with always on connection to play, you know because you have to have some douchebags city next to yours and you can already tell people will do shit to screw with your city by making their city so bad Detroit looks like paradise. Not to mention it took them over a decade to even touch the franchise again.
Dead Space. Good fun games and a original IP made up all by themselves not long ago.
All their sports games, new roster same price, year after year.
Dragon Age. First one? Amazing. Second one? Horrible. The difference? Bioware was not owned by EA till the first one was 90% done.
Command & Conquer. I'm not even gonna get into this.
On top of just buying talent/IP's and then destroying them for the quick buck with lots of questionable practices. They try to do a bit of everything but in the end, they are just bad to average in it all instead. Look at Origin, it has been out a year and no changes to it despite a lot of stuff on it needing a fix.
There are other bad publishers/devs out there. I agree, Activison is freaking horrid, if it wasn't for a new CoD each year and Blizzard that company would be dead by now. Ubisoft is another, they are about as two faced as it comes. But EA just takes what is bad from other publishers and adds they own crap on top of it to make it all much worst. I guess we did find what EA is good at heh.
Basically it all comes down to this.
EA is not good for gaming.
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