What exactly went wrong with EA?

[Pissmaster]

From what I've seen, EA seemed to be either the first, or most prominent publisher to start pushing all kinds of anti-consumer practices, such as shameless microtransactions in their games. The Sims 1 already had EIGHT expansion packs, which was unheard of for a game released in 2000. If you bought the game at launch ($50) and kept up with the expansions as they came, that'd be $290 total. This was during an era where even two expansion packs were considered to be excessive.

Sims 2 introduced Stuff packs, and either 3 or 4 started just selling furniture and things piecemeal, with 4 outright removing features that were just mainstays in 3. The game's ecosystem was just getting really predatory and greedy before such practices were commonplace. I'm sure someone whose familiar with The Sims could comment in more detail, but that's what I've heard.

EA was also the first publisher in the Steam era to push their own PC game platform, Origin, where you'd have to get their launcher to play their new games. Of course, they returned to Steam years and years later, but the precedent was already set, and now the PC game space is full of dodgy launchers, with those often being the only way to buy big-name titles. And of course, a lot of their back catalog is just totally unavailable. It's pretty weird to think how there's just no way to buy the original SimCity on any modern download service, despite so many obscure random games from 40 years ago being readily available for a couple of bucks, but here we are.

 

[Manul Otocolobus]

ubisoft was WAY worse in the past, like their always online drm shit and then claiming "pc players don't want our games" thus focusing on console.

I would argue that Ubisoft now is as it has been for quite some time, a steaming sack of shit.

EA is well known for essentially being pure slow-acting corporate poison. Anything they acquire, it dies slowly, and then keeps shambling on as a zombie afterwards.

 

[Had]

Do we really need one?

I need it.

 

[DeadwastePrime]

greed is a powerful beast

 

[BillionBisonBucks]

That's fair, but the good games were still signed off as "yes, we will publish this with our money" at some point by someone at EA.

List of Electronic Arts games: 1983–1999 - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

When you publish literally everything you can get your hands on, some of it will be decent. Nobody could look at that list and seriously think there was any kind of sense for great games, though.

Dom, have you considered that some of the things you have warm fuzzy memories about may be because you were an idiot child when you formed those memories and the thing in question has always sucked? This seems to be a recurring theme with you.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

Do we really need one? You couldn't have sexy girls.

Can't have a nazi representing the commies.

 

[Dom Cruise]

Dom, have you considered that some of the things you have warm fuzzy memories about may be because you were an idiot child when you formed those memories and the thing in question has always sucked? This seems to be a recurring theme with you.

Not really, because for example I didn't play Red Alert 2 until 2014, a while ago yeah but well after I was a kid and a teen and the game totally blew me away with how great it was, it felt like a breath of fresh air even back then and that's not due to any personal nostalgic memories of it.

And as I said, EA sucked too from about 2003-2006, I was a teen at the time and I noticed that all they seemed to put out was licensed, racing and sports games and Medal of Honor Rising Sun was a pile of shit, I was able to recognize when something sucked even back then, but my point was I noticed EA would have a few periods where they would put out quality.

But where's something like Red Alert 2 today? The closest game to that in recent years is Battlefield 1, but that was already over 5 years ago, today we get Battlefield 2042, which are you starting to see my point?

There's always been shitty and mediocre games, but it really does seem like the ratio of shit and mediocre is outweighing the ratio of good in recent years.

 

[BillionBisonBucks]

Not really, because for example I didn't play Red Alert 2 until 2014, a while ago yeah but well after I was a kid and a teen and the game totally blew me away with how great it was, it felt like a breath of fresh air even back then and that's not due to any personal nostalgic memories of it.

And as I said, EA sucked too from about 2003-2006, I was a teen at the time and I noticed that all they seemed to put out was licensed, racing and sports games and Medal of Honor Rising Sun was a pile of shit, I was able to recognize when something sucked even back then, but my point was I noticed EA would have a few periods where they would put out quality.

But where's something like Red Alert 2 today? The closest game to that in recent years is Battlefield 1, but that was already over 5 years ago, today we get Battlefield 2042, which are you starting to see my point?

There's always been shitty and mediocre games, but it really does seem like the ratio of shit and mediocre is outweighing the ratio of good in recent years.

I'm glad you picked RA2 for an example, as it's one of my favorite games of all time and I ate up every scrap of media about it when it was fresh. Even then, two entire decades ago, EA's purchase of Westwood was seen as bad news all around. The EA Cycle would be codified by what followed, but Westwood being hollowed out after Renegade was when people started to say 'Hey, we' ve seen this a few times now. Is this just what EA does?'

The cycle, of course, is to buy a hugely successful studio, and leave it alone until there's a flop. Lately they force it to happen if they want it to (Poor Dead Space), but back then they were patient and would just wait it out. Every studio misses sometimes, and when they did, EA would change things. Sometimes people would resign without explanation, sometimes two underperforming studios would get smashed together and expected to fix their extant issues while integrating an entire new staff, sometimes EA would inject their own staff. Some studios survived this, the first time, but I can't think of a single one that thrived under EA.

Now, it's true that every ten years or so EA makes a big show of how they're cleaning house and investing in the ART, dammit! Sometimes some very good games come out of these phases (Poor Dead Space). While I can't speak with any real confidence or insight what happens in EA's boardrooms to make it go wrong every time, I suspect it's something much like what they do to their studios, being done to their young and successful executives as soon as they slip.

Short story long, EA as a company has an addict's brain and they've killed several golden geese. I wish Disney was going to buy them instead of Square, but life is rarely that poetic.

 

[You're The Man Now Dog]

"EA bad" is just a shallow take on the truth, and that's "big video game companies bad". With some exceptions, of course.

As to why, my theory is that developing games used to require some degree of intelligence. I'm talking back in the Assembly days, when you were communicating directly with the console itself. Watch some Coding Secrets videos to get a good idea of the ridiculous bullshit devs had to do in order to make a game really stand out. Those people were bona fide geniuses, at least when it came to programming.

As of about the PS2, consoles could do basically anything. They no longer required creativity, and you probably didn't even have to read the manual to make a game for it. I'd bet nearly all PS2 programmers couldn't name every opcode the system had in its instruction set, but to program an earlier console that was a necessity.

As such, companies started sleepwalking through the dev cycle because there was nothing preventing them from doing it. It used to be that if you wanted to make a really impressive game, you learned how to manipulate the hardware into doing things that seemed impossible on paper. Those days are long gone. Every console is the same, every game is being made on one of two engines, and game development is no longer an art, it's just a job.

There are still exceptions here and there, when a game truly blows me away with what it can do, but those are few and far between.

 

[Celebrate Nite]

Nobody could look at that list and seriously think there was any kind of sense for great games, though.

Couple of them are actually ok (B.O.B. and Rolo To The Rescue) but those were only published by EA and developed by someone else so those don't really count. Otherwise, yea.. not an impressive list unless you enjoy sports games in general.

 

[thegooddoctor]

The Internet doesn’t forget your sins EA, Battlefront 2 will live on forever as one of the biggest scams in gaming history and epitome of the ‘micro transaction loot box issue in games today. EA is at its core just an immensely greed focused company and have just monopolised on making unfinished games with endless updates and microtransactions because they’re so wealthy that they can afford to be lazy churning out rushed and inferior products. Valve as we all know are somewhat similar to This but the big difference is that their game quality standards are vastly superior and they prioritise quality over quantity as their main company approach to games.

Overall EA really are just a big scummy company that have decided to release inferior content due to laziness and lack of ethics, not much different from many other scummy companies. Their issues are huge but easy to understand what is wrong with them.

 

[Quijibo69]

In before Mirosoft buys them out soon. What are monopolys anymore?

 

[Basic Blonde Boy]

They never made a sequel to EA Playground on Wii. That was their biggest crime.

 

[Leaf-eon]

I still haven't forgave EA for taking Alice the Madness returns off of steam and making it Origin only game for the pc. Truly an unforgivable act.

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[Tom Nook's Gloryhole]

In before Mirosoft buys them out soon. What are monopolys anymore?

EA is fine while they currently have their major sports contracts + Disney/Star Wars contract, if something major fucks up and they lose the Madden + FIFA franchises then they'll be sniped by Microsoft before you can say "Future Cop LAPD 2 when"

But honestly, given that literally nothing happened with Activision's contracts when all that shit kicked off you'd essentially need the head of EA to start slicing up kids, and even then Disney might be ok with it.