IGN: Why Do People 'Hate' EA? - Seriously? What is that all about? We asked EA.

[Fire&Blood]

EA wouldn't attract as much attention as they do if EA were "only" a publisher. Here is an example that most North Americans aren't familiar with: the FIFA series. Developed and published by EA, with lots of money of thrown at it (some of it on exclusive FIFA and UEFA licenses) it's annual refreshes (sound familiar?) thoroughly sucked for nearly a decade. Eventually EA got it, I think 2 versions ago.

We all know it's $$$ but it's funny how Crytek dropped Ubisoft and went to EA. Reading between the lines from Cevat Yerli's interview, they'll part ways after Crysis 3.

EA: Either buying creativity or throwing money at something until it's good enough, watering down potent projects in the progress.

 

[wuliheron]

EA wouldn't attract as much attention as they do if EA were "only" a publisher. Here is an example that most North Americans aren't familiar with: the FIFA series. Developed and published by EA, with lots of money of thrown at it (some of it on exclusive FIFA and UEFA licenses) it's annual refreshes (sound familiar?) thoroughly sucked for nearly a decade. Eventually EA got it, I think 2 versions ago.

We all know it's $$$ but it's funny how Crytek dropped Ubisoft and went to EA. Reading between the lines from Cevat Yerli's interview, they'll part ways after Crysis 3.

EA: Either buying creativity or throwing money at something until it's good enough, watering down potent projects in the progress.

I think you might be right and Crytek looks poised to jump ship the minute it is to their advantage. EA doesn't ask for loyalty, doesn't command loyalty, and doesn't get it. If you consider someone publishing a new version of "pong" to be a developer than EA is a developer. No different than Microsoft really in that occasionally they come out with a game using dated technology, brag about how high tech it is, and monopolize the market by sheer force.

 

[Lonyo]

EA wouldn't attract as much attention as they do if EA were "only" a publisher. Here is an example that most North Americans aren't familiar with: the FIFA series. Developed and published by EA, with lots of money of thrown at it (some of it on exclusive FIFA and UEFA licenses) it's annual refreshes (sound familiar?) thoroughly sucked for nearly a decade. Eventually EA got it, I think 2 versions ago.

We all know it's $$$ but it's funny how Crytek dropped Ubisoft and went to EA. Reading between the lines from Cevat Yerli's interview, they'll part ways after Crysis 3.

EA: Either buying creativity or throwing money at something until it's good enough, watering down potent projects in the progress.

EA wouldn't attract as much attention as they do if they didn't make games or own studios where people want to like the games.
You don't see much hate for Ubisoft, because no one gives a damn about Ubisoft games for the most part. You get the occasional hate, but nowhere near as much as for EA because they don't make as many games that people care about/want to care about.

As for money, well they had a net operative margin of below 1%.
That compares to Activision Blizzard's margin of around 25%, or to put it another way, ActiBlizz made $1bn on $4.7b, while EA made $35m on $4.1bn. They aren't very good at gouging people for money.

(And to the guy who wonders how much they spend on admin, you don't care that much, because you could easily find out for yourself if you wanted, it's publicly available information).

And speaking of ActiBlizz and EA, are you sure you want Westwood/Bullfrog/etc back in name? Do names matter?
The guys who make CoD, even under the Infinity Ward name, aren't the same guys who started IW.
The guys who made Diablo 3 under the Blizzard name aren't the guys who made Diablo/Diablo 2.
The guys who would be under Westwood or Bullfrog wouldn't be the guys who ran Westwood/Bullfrog and made the games you remember 10+ years ago. It's pretty meaningless to complain about studios being shut down unless you know that the studios which were shut down were the people who made the studios what they were.
Now they could have been, but they equally might not have been, so it's silly to harp on about them.

Also one part of EA is only a publisher, EA Partners (http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2010/05/25/a-history-of-ea-partners.aspx), and they managed to be appealing enough for Crytek, id, Epic and Valve.

 

[Aikouka]

I've always figured that EA gets a lot of flak because they tend to look at the video game sector as a business. If what looks like a better path for their company (i.e. for the investors) isn't necessarily as favorable for the dedicated gamers, it doesn't matter. At least from what I've seen, that's what tends to piss people off. It's not much different than other media. You think the FOX network gets a lot of love from geeks? Definitely not after how many geek/nerd series they've run into the ground!

 

[Fire&Blood]

Appeal would imply EA had something else to offer and attract top studios, I think it was simply more money.

I wouldn't accuse EA of "gouging" any more than others and I don't think that gouging would improve the net operative margin.

Can't blame EA for everything. IMO, gaming started degrading 2005-ish. I wouldn't exactly blame the consoles but since the current gen consoles, gaming lost something, both on the PC and the consoles. There is also a variety of other factors that helped make things worse. Ubisoft's Tom Clancy line up is proof enough for me. First 3 Splinter Cell titles were awesome and had great replay value, the last one was really bad IMO. There are enough bad things about Ubisoft too but at least they had good in house stuff.

Ultimately it's a business everywhere but IMO, EA stands out for managing to put out games with the least "soul" and character. There are plenty of others in the market and while the aforementioned quality loss is an issue elsewhere too, others manage to put more "oomph" in their products.

I don't boycott EA but it is the last place I would expect fresh stuff to be brewed in.

I agree that studios lose their flavors over time, all the time but it's worth noting that regardless of being independent or in publisher's grip, the better ones tend to be outside of EA.

 

[JujuFish]

You don't see much hate for Ubisoft, because no one gives a damn about Ubisoft games for the most part.

Ubisoft games I'm looking forward to:
Assassin's Creed III
Shootmania
Watch Dogs

EA games I'm looking forward to:
SimCity

EA is more than three times as big as Ubisoft, yet I'm looking forward to three times as many Ubisoft games. In other words, speak for yourself.

 

[Martimus]

I don't hate any company. I wont buy EA games because they have poor customer service, and are more frustrating than fun. I also don't trust them not to install some background malware like they did when I installed DA:O.

 

[wirednuts]

ea has done more damage to the gaming industry then anyone else combined.

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

So long as they sell off their IP's, fine. I want another Wing Commander and Dungeon Keeper.

Take a look at Wing Commander Saga - absolutely breathtaking
http://wcsaga.com/

Buy the franchise, rush it to make their dollar for the holiday season. Doesn't meet their self entitled sales goals, so they drop it like a bad habit, discontinue support for it, and squat on and lock up the IP in a dungeon somewhere never to see the light of day or be done justice by another developer.

Wonder if the EA and FOX execs come from the same in-bread redneck family?

 

[Fardringle]

In my opinion, the saddest part of this attempted PR spin article is that the EA rep apparently either doesn't know, or chooses to ignore, the one real reason why so many game players "hate" the company so much. They buy up fun, interesting, successful companies and then either sit on the products from those companies and never update them or don't release new games based on the concepts, or they destroy the games by taking out everything that made them fun and interesting in the first place.

 

[alkemyst]

i am EA here

 

[Nashemon]

What a worthless article. IGN, known for getting paid by publishers to hype their games, and EA, known for paying critics to hype their games. Match made in heaven. The writer of the article begins to make a point that would actually have some merit. A point that I would actually like to see EA address. But then simply plays it off, defending EA's decisions. Then they add a quote from EA that brings nearly nothing to the discussion and doesn't clear up anything. IGN didn't ask EA anything, except for some cash.

 

[sigurros81]

What a worthless article. IGN, known for getting paid by publishers to hype their games, and EA, known for paying critics to hype their games. Match made in heaven. The writer of the article begins to make a point that would actually have some merit. A point that I would actually like to see EA address. But then simply plays it off, defending EA's decisions. Then they add a quote from EA that brings nearly nothing to the discussion and doesn't clear up anything. IGN didn't ask EA anything, except for some cash.

That's what I thought after reading the article, not that EA paid off IGN per say, but the article was completely pointless.

 

[PowerYoga]

Just a PR article by EA, nothing to see here.

 

[RPD]

Last time I checked, when you want to find out why someone thinks something, you ask that person. Not their thought.

 

[BurnItDwn]

I hate all corporations that have a "primary concern" of "making money."

Businesses "primary concern" should be to provide service(s) and/or product(s). Profit should be secondary.

If the primacy concern is just making money, then meh, fvck em.

 

[Throckmorton]

I did a ctrl-F for "DRM" and found nothing. What moron wrote this article?

 

[Gonad the Barbarian]

EA destroys innovation and quality for mass market appeal and profit maximization. That's why people hate EA. That's why people hate a lot of corporations.

 

[thejunglegod]

This article was written to cash in on the fact that people on the internet have a much higher probability of reading in on an EA RANT rather than on real world problem companies such as BP or BOA.

 

[thejunglegod]

I did a ctrl-F for "DRM" and found nothing. What moron wrote this article?

ROFL. I see what you did there. Maybe, there's a sequel in the waiting?

 

[Absolution75]

All I really got from this is that because EA is a corporation and their purpose is to make money, that they should get a free pass. What a bunch of crap.

Yes, they have a good amount of IP, but only because they bought it all. Then they systematically destroy it.

The excuse is that they need to sell 5 million copies to make a profit. Maybe their business model just isn't viable and they should leave it to the smaller companies that run more efficiently (ala Bioware 10 years ago).


I've also heard many horror stories about working there (from people that actually worked there). Its probably one of the last companies that I'd want to work for.

 

[PrincessFrosty]

EA are a large corporation which is run by people who aren't gamers and who don't care about making good games, all they care about is making the most amount of money and they have no issue with dicking over gamers or entire intellectual property if it facilitates that goal.

Usually when this happens you vote with your wallet and the system self corrects, the businesses that take things too far are pushed out the market. The real problem we have right now is the console business model has exploded in popularity and brought gaming in to the mainstream and we now have an extremely massive casual audience with lower expectations from games and hold the majority of the money.

Casual gamers are far less interested in quality of games, their decision to buy a game is more swayed by seeing an advert for it on TV than the actual quality of the game itself, which is why big studios spend 50% of their multi-million dollar budgets on advertising. Casual gamers tend to have short attention spans and far more limited time for gaming, they want something accessible that requires no effort to learn to play, it's about being able to pick up and play in 3 minutes and convenient enough to only need to play for 15 minutes at a time.

This all ads up to bad games, they're shorter because casual gamers simply never finish long games, multi-player skill requirements get normalized so that any player can pick up a controller, mash keys and score points. Game play gets dumbed down massively so its accessible to a greater number of people, they often lack a coherent overarching story or narrative because it's simply not necessary to deliver the other requirements in the game. The fidelity of the graphics and audio never change on the primary platform (console) because the hardware is fixed, so for long periods so we lose innovation and get stagnation.

EA are just very good at feeding on the sheep, it's sad that gaming has dropped to this level honestly, but where there are sheep there will be wolves so in some way I expect to see the "EA's" of the world, they're an inevitability.

My main gripe with EA is that to facilitate their own profit gouging they tend to reach into the rest of the market and buy up pre-existing intellectual property which has happy and loyal fans and then rape it to death, that gives a lot of fans a legitimate gripe with EA, simply not buying their products isn't going to stop them from doing it again in future.

 

[Nebor]

I hate all corporations that have a "primary concern" of "making money."

Businesses "primary concern" should be to provide service(s) and/or product(s). Profit should be secondary.

If the primacy concern is just making money, then meh, fvck em.

So if I told you that your primary concern at your job was to provide services and/or products, and if you make enough money to buy food, that's just secondary, you'd be alright with that?

 

[shortylickens]

How much did IGN get paid to write that article?

 

[diesbudt]

.

Can't blame EA for everything. IMO, gaming started degrading 2005-ish.

This is more based on the fact that new ideas for games are now coming so few and far between, that you could almost say the market is "stale"

Besides Portal 1/2 and original DA Origins in the past many years I have yet to see a game that has redefined some areas in a Genre. They all just keep going to a similar formula.

Do we need a 100th+ FPS shooter this console Gen?
Or how about another action hack/slash mindless button smashing game?

Personally I have nothing against EA, I judge each game on its own and I have found enough games I enjoy from EA to satisfy me.