Why is EA the worst company in America?

[Regs]

Still boycotting Madden due to the exclusivity. Wish everyone would so we could have some new, better NFL football games out there.

Isn't that because the NFL will only license it to one party not so much about EA? Obviously EA is the only one willing to pay the price of omission.

 

[Regs]

If there is anything more wrong with EA is it's communication to its target audience. You don't even know who they're trying to target with most of their games. This is why they are perceived as an evil empire is because nobody can figure out their method behind the madness.

 

[alangrift]

Actually THQ was until they went out of business (my reason for picking them right there)

 

[irishScott]

EA haters are better represented on the internet.

This. I have a feeling most of the people who were screwed over by the housing crises weren't hardcore gamers that vote on internet polls.

 

[irishScott]

If there is anything more wrong with EA is it's communication to its target audience. You don't even know who they're trying to target with most of their games. This is why they are perceived as an evil empire is because nobody can figure out their method behind the madness.

Well most recently their "methods" have consisted of:

1. Taking the AAA Mass Effect Franchise and outright lying about the nature of the game after it had gone gold, and making a pathetically feeble attempt to correct things after fan outcry raised over $80,000 for charity; and hated the plot so much that it was assumed by most of the fanbase to be a Deus Ex Machina until Bioware clarified that no, it really was just that bad.

2. Making a non-functional and feature-stripped SimCity sequel that was universally hated.

3. Making a flat MMORPG that was greeted with a resounding "meh".

4. Making BF4 so buggy that they're being sued by their own shareholders.
http://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/shareholders-sue-ea-problems-battlefield-4/



There's no method to their madness, this is just what happens when a video game company, or any company for that matter, is run by business majors. They don't know video games, they don't know gamers, and they have no interest in getting to know either. All they know is marketing and economics and repeating what is proven to work to get them quick money. And now it's starting to break down in earnest. They are not the first company to follow this cycle, nor will they be the last.

 

[Fire&Blood]

FIFA franchise is a good example. For more than a decade, they would essentially brute force their way into a soccer/football marketshare. EA's major competitor for the soccer/football market was Konami. Konami's game was a lot harder but not nearly as frustrating, it was very satisfying to go through all the build up just to score a single goal in the master league mode, which EA copied and made a online pvp mode out of it.

EA's annual iterations were flashier than Konami's, they hired the most popular commentators/announcers for their games and of course they bought licenses for the leagues,teams and right to using player names, hiring super stars for ads etc etc. Yet Konami's game was consistently harder but more rewarding and simply much more enjoyable to play. EA's game had no soul, it was shallow and within 15 minutes, you found ways to own and score dozens of very unrealistic goals in one match. Having played both throughout the years, the single most glaring difference I can point to is stepping up difficulty in FIFA equaled putting AI in god mode and making it immediately frustrating without any transition whatsoever.

Eventually, after a dozen iterations, EA brute forced their way into making a decent competitor about 3 years ago with the latest versions being equal to Konami's PES.

EA games are flash but little substance. Studios that have been under EA long enough to have their core diluted struggle to create immersive games without bombarding the player's senses, as if trying to confuse you into being immersed in their games. Like the FIFA example proves, eventually they will "get it right" with other franchises too but the risk of them failing with a franchise will always be high and because of the way they go about their business, their games will always have inherent flaws:

 

[Arkaign]

Isn't that because the NFL will only license it to one party not so much about EA? Obviously EA is the only one willing to pay the price of omission.

LOL You mean price of admission, although one could also say that they are paying for the other companies to be omitted.

The EA exclusive deal happened because the NFL decided to charge more for the license, and EA responded with demands for exclusivity, which the NFL agreed to given that nobody else was willing to step up with that barrel of cash. Easily more $ is spent on the license itself vs. the game development at this point haha.

I have no doubt that if someone else came with an even larger truckload of cash, that the NFL would happily break the deal, but nobody is going to do that.

 

[blastingcap]

My list of concerns about EA:

1) Their push towards worse an worse DRM did nothing but screw the customer. They repeatedly have been shutting down relatively young games from their servers and taking products away from paying customers just a few years after they were released.

2) Origin and the drastic move to remove their games from all other sale stores other than physical disks is anti competitive and locks in customers to Origin.

3) EA seems to be forcing the developers of games to make a lot of sequels and driving its talent away with the requirements it is placing on the developers.

4) EA is forcing in multiplayer features into games that don't need them, where they don't make sense and calling those games MMOs purely as a way to hide the fact they are pushing always online DRM onto their customers.

5) EA isn't deploying enough DRM servers which just makes the amount of DRM across all of their games worse. Its bad enough they have this stuff and it keeps going wrong, its worse that a new game is unplayable due to insufficient server capacity.

6) The quality of games on release day has been pretty bad. Games like Sim City are still broken even now. EA's current strategy seems to be to release really broken games, fix them a bit until everyone gives up and then leave them in their sorry state before shutting out the few remaining fans next year when they release a sequel.

7) EA has been acquiring studios all over the place. Initially it seems to just force branding but the nefarious intent comes a little later as they integrate the studio and destroy all its ideals. Multiple studio heads have left with disputes over pay and conditions and the horrid situation EA management put them through.

8) EA on its own having created a monopoly on the supply of its games has increased the price on PC to more like console levels, and set a higher price for its games on the consoles as well.

9) When a studio inevitably fails to make huge sales after all this rubbish has dragged their sales down EA will fire all the staff.

The end result is as customers we get sequel after sequel, each more buggy than the last all coated with the worst forms of DRM at a higher price than everyone else. It destroys great studios within a few years and along with it great game series. Very few companies seem to survive this process and come out making good games in the end. What is there to like about this corporate strategy exactly? It has no redeeming qualities as a business really, its the very worst of corporate culture.

One thing going for EA is its created a lot of Kickstarter projects and startup games companies. The refugees from this process are banding together and creating games without the evil hand of a publisher.

This, and EA pretty much admitted to no. 4 when their executive bragged about how all of their recent releases has an online/multiplayer element (the better to screw you with always-on DRM, even though EA servers can be flaky and they shut them down over time), which is horrible when combined with no. 1. Plus Origins is buggier than Steam and there are issues like with rushed launch dates (BF4) and butchered launch service (SimCity).

I'm horrified by no. 7 and what someone else said about how every studio EA touches turns to crap; EA as publisher demands its way or the highway, and studios usually buckle to EA's demands to gamers' detriment. EA and Activision do this all the time. Pre-EA/Activision Blizzard, BioWare, Infinity Ward, etc. were all better studios prior to acquisition.

For comparison, here are other major publishers:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_game_publishers

None of them have the horrible rep that EA has, though Ubisoft is a strong second especially with their always-on DRM that they supposedly are turning away from, but once bitten, twice shy... Blizzard and IW went down after Activision but I don't think Activision is QUITE as bad as EA or Ubi yet.

If EA/Ubi/Activision weren't so bad, Bethesda would look worse for offering buggy releases and expecting the mod community to fix things for them, but EA/Ubi/A are so bad that they have me hoping that they don't attempt to buy out Bethesda/iD from Zenimax.

2K thankfully already rejected EA's offer a few years ago and I doubt they are any more interested today. At least their stuff works.

CA games are sucky repeats these days but I can only imagine how much worse they'd be under EA. Rome 2 a nightmare of bugs.

Stardock, SquareEnix, and Eidos look like saints compared to most of these other studios. Stardock's Elemental was a big black eye, though, due to launch issues.

Valve is not really for sale and their infrequent launches are well-received; Gabe has basically said over his dead body to that one. Please eat healthier Gabe, we don't want your inheritors selling Valve....

On the flipside, the least-EA-like big name publisher is probably CD Projekt.

Perhaps Kickstarter games will force publishers to get better.

 

[Zanovar]

Worst company in america?hmm not sure about that,worldwide? possibly,for the simple reason they took down the warhammer servers,i kind of liked dipping in for free pvp upto lvl 10 (yes im cheap).

Just to add i actually bought the game at release karak izor server,any old players reading this im sorry i killed you lots neutron lvl 40 marauder.

 

[skipsneeky2]

Ea should be releasing more stable games on day one, i hear in the BF4 thread that people are still crashing 2 months later after release lol.I bought the game and had it less then 24 hours before i got my refund and i tell you the issues i had made me wonder how the hell the game got released.

 

[HeXen]

I see EA as a company that tries harder to adapt to a changing culture. Perhaps too hard but it's no joke at all the publishers that have gone out of business that most everyone forgot. Like G.O.D. games, they were a good publisher in that they believed developers should get a larger share of the profits, guess that didn't work out too well.

 

[alcoholbob]

Banks didn't put millions out of their homes, people making stupid financial decisions did. And it wasn't millions, either way, but nice exaggeration.

Banks lowered their lending requirements and sometimes engaged in outright fraud regarding income or paying people to buy a house, so they could sell those mortgages to Fanny & Freddy who guaranteed them.

It was a moral hazard caused by government guarantees and banks who made decisions they would not have in the free market due to government intervention in the market.

This is what happens when politicians (Bush in this case) can't stomach a recession (which we should have had due to the Dot Com bubble), and worked with the Federal Reserve to blow up a real estate bubble (which Greenspan admits to doing) with fiscal policy and a dropping of lending regulations in 2004 to avoid a recession caused by the Clinton years.

And now we have a stock market bubble from QE because politicians (in this case Obama) can't stomach a recession from the housing bubble, so he blows up a new one in somewhere else with more borrowed money for "stimulus".

 

[blastingcap]

Banks lowered their lending requirements and sometimes engaged in outright fraud regarding income or paying people to buy a house, so they could sell those mortgages to Fanny & Freddy who guaranteed them.

It was a moral hazard caused by government guarantees and banks who made decisions they would not have in the free market due to government intervention in the market.

This is what happens when politicians (Bush in this case) can't stomach a recession (which we should have had due to the Dot Com bubble), and worked with the Federal Reserve to blow up a real estate bubble (which Greenspan admits to doing) with fiscal policy and a dropping of lending regulations in 2004 to avoid a recession caused by the Clinton years.

And now we have a stock market bubble from QE because politicians (in this case Obama) can't stomach a recession from the housing bubble, so he blows up a new one in somewhere else with more borrowed money for "stimulus".

The housing bubble is back in some parts of the country.

 

[alcoholbob]

The housing bubble is back in some parts of the country.

Well the difference this time is the housing bubble is not driven by consumer demand from cheap loans, as lending standards have been tightened for main street, but rather only by wall street speculators since certain banks are getting all this interest-free money from the Fed which is being printed out of the thin air (and drives up our prices since it's an "invisible" tax).

It's just part of the stock market bubble, as more and more cheap money flows out of the Fed's spigots, people run out of places in the stock market to put that money so they just start buying up all kinds of assets including newly constructed housing, which no one will live in.

The problem with QE is its outright theft of capital from main street. You can give me 1 million dollars interest free too, and I can make a profit from any sort of interest bearing investment vehicle and give you the 1 million dollars back and I've earned free money off the backs of the common worker, as their commodity prices rise due to debasement of currency through printing.

 

[Kadarin]

6) The quality of games on release day has been pretty bad. Games like Sim City are still broken even now. EA's current strategy seems to be to release really broken games, fix them a bit until everyone gives up and then leave them in their sorry state before shutting out the few remaining fans next year when they release a sequel.

I made the mistake of buying a copy of Sim City via Origin; last night while in the middle of playing Origin decided to go into offline mode, which made the game stop working. It wasn't my internet connection, and Origin was down for about an hour and a half. Of course, there was no status update on EA's webpage about it, and their online help was laughable.

I will purchase no further EA games, and will avoid Origin like the plague.

 

[TallBill]

Yeah no more EA games for me.

 

[Venomous]

All EA is today is like the record companies from the 60-90s, who ended up screwing the artists over while making $$ hand over fist. EA is bad for the gaming business and I can't wait until they get knocked down. The industry needs to change and go back to inhouse development AND publishing their very own titles.

 

[TeknoBug]

SOE is probably the only other company that could knock down EA, unfortunately their focus is completely different from EA that they're both not on the same ball field.

I made the mistake of buying a copy of Sim City via Origin; last night while in the middle of playing Origin decided to go into offline mode, which made the game stop working. It wasn't my internet connection, and Origin was down for about an hour and a half. Of course, there was no status update on EA's webpage about it, and their online help was laughable.

I will purchase no further EA games, and will avoid Origin like the plague.

The latest SimCity is so F'ing stupid, a single player game that requires a connection at all times to play (well it's been tested that you can still play after pulling the network plug but you lose your city progress).

 

[Maximilian]

SOE is probably the only other company that could knock down EA, unfortunately their focus is completely different from EA that they're both not on the same ball field.
The latest SimCity is so F'ing stupid, a single player game that requires a connection at all times to play (well it's been tested that you can still play after pulling the network plug but you lose your city progress).

Aye and the cherry on top being EA outright lied about it. I remember them saying something like "it needs to be online only so the servers can do the heavy lifting with all the complex calculations". Complete BS!

 

[exdeath]

EA? What's that?

 

[Daverino]

It is laughable that a company like EA, which makes entertainment consumables, could be considered the worst company in America.

There are hundreds of companies out there that make their money by creating or exacerbating human misery and every one of them is worse than EA.

If anything, the title being bestowed on EA shows just how shallow and insipid the American public can be. When you have a bank like Bank of America being held liable for close to a billion dollars in mortgage fraud and JP Morgan settling with the feds for 13 BILLION dollars for fraudulent activity, the ending of ME3 doesn't seem like such a crime.

 

[Topweasel]

All EA is today is like the record companies from the 60-90s, who ended up screwing the artists over while making $$ hand over fist. EA is bad for the gaming business and I can't wait until they get knocked down. The industry needs to change and go back to inhouse development AND publishing their very own titles.

I think you guys are looking at it wrong. Look just about everyone has some issue with something EA did, but for the exact reasons that a lot of people have hated them for without them we would have had at least 2 collapses in gaming since 95.

EA needs IP and they over pay to buy out some of our favorite companies. But because of them and their development system they have been able to keep top level gaming financially viable. As someone also put out there that while it sucked from 2003-2010 when they were buying up everyone, they have pushed us the gamers to make Indie games viable and hopefully high class. Games like Star Citizen is a chance for the gaming community to put their money where their mouth is. Are you willing to fund a game prior to release to keep bean counters away from design decisions?

Look on the other end the games that we loved growing up from companies that we loved were always a bad release or development cycle issue from dying. We want the great Bioware, C&C, Sim City, and so on game. But look at the majors from the heyday in the early 2000's. Most died and the ones that didn't either moved their markets (Valve, Epic) or sold themselves (id, Westwood). Take Westwood for example. They knew starting with development of Emperor while working on 3 games and a new engine (for Dune) that they weren't going to be able to make it. They got a bunch of money and left EA holding the bag with 3 unfinished games.

I don't like EA practices for the most part. But in the end and would rather not have them involved with any studio I like. But they serve an important service within the gaming community. They are like the guys that dropped the bombs in Japan. You don't have to like that they are doing it. You don't have to like the outcome. But you should understand that they did what needed to be done.

 

[pong lenis]

I don't like EA practices for the most part. But in the end and would rather not have them involved with any studio I like. But they serve an important service within the gaming community. They are like the guys that dropped the bombs in Japan. You don't have to like that they are doing it. You don't have to like the outcome. But you should understand that they did what needed to be done.

Wait why did 140,000 women and children need to be vaporized?

 

[Topweasel]

Wait why did 140,000 women and children need to be vaporized?

To convince Japan that the US had the superiority in this war and that if they wanted to continue the war they weren't ever going to win it was going to cost them a lot more lives. It was also a huge bluff, we were dwindling in resources, our holds were precarious.

Japan also gets the benifit now because they are a major ally and their attempts to take over the pacific had little to do with major countries that we love and hold dear. But if it was Germany and we were supporting the UK and we dropped one in Munich we would hear about how horrible it was as much. But what Japan was doing in the Pacific with places they had taken over and POW's was worse than the Germans and how they treated the Jews at times.

Those two bombs ended one of the worse wars and kept millions more on both sides from dieing.

 

[DeadFred]

Wait why did 140,000 women and children need to be vaporized?

Far more than that would have been killed in the upcoming conventional bombing and eventual invasion of Japan. They were not about to give up and vowed to fight to the last. However after a couple of vaporizations they changed their minds, thus saving countless of both American and Japanese lives in the long run.

Edit: I missed Topweasel's reply there somehow. I mostly agree except for the huge bluff part, we were gonna finish that war one way or another.