EA is not evil.

[Cabisco]

This all looks very wonderful.

Personally I don't think EA is evil, just a little stupid sometimes. The pure unadultered hatred they receive gets hilarious sometimes, but you can occasionally see the point people are making.

Saying all this, some of my favorite games of the past 5 years have been made thanks to EA and so for that they deserve a lot of credit from me. I don't like how angry some people get at them but find it perfectly fine to buy all their games and then continue raging, quite irks me.

 

[Aeonknight]

This all looks very wonderful.

Personally I don't think EA is evil, just a little stupid sometimes. The pure unadultered hatred they receive gets hilarious sometimes, but you can occasionally see the point people are making.

Saying all this, some of my favorite games of the past 5 years have been made thanks to EA and so for that they deserve a lot of credit from me. I don't like how angry some people get at them but find it perfectly fine to buy all their games and then continue raging, quite irks me.

That's pretty much my position as well. No matter how stupid their business practices can be, at no point should any of it come as a surprise. No one at EA tricked them into buying a game and then having to buy day 1 DLC. If it really pisses them off, they need to stop supporting said practices.

 

[Vigormortis]

X

Very well argued. I still say that Steam is the general go-to platform for digital distribution and having a restrictive ToS isn't healthy for developers (and yes I do feel that extends to the console three) but I will concede it isn't a "go to Steam or your game will fail" situation.

I actually agree. The more restrictive a ToS becomes, the more I worry. And while I was initially worried with the ToS change on Steam, I wasn't as bothered with it as I was with Microsofts ToS change for Xbox Live some months ago.

(namely because, if I had legal matters to settle with Steam, I'd rather they be done in small claims court anyway, and on Valve's bill. So...)

Still, I can see where you're coming from. It's not an invalid concern.

 

[DiamanteGeeza]

As someone who works in this industry (and has done for a long time), the biggest changes that have caused most forums to be ablaze with EA/Activision hatred in the last few years are the subtle ones that have slowly crept into the gaming business.

The industry has matured. It's no longer seen as a kids/geeks thing, and places like Wall Street and VC companies have suddenly realized that there's money to be had from games. The result of this? Large corporations like Activision and EA have become more corporate and, to do this, they have to hire more corporate-type people - the ones in the khakis and slip-on shoes with tassles, and the ones that love their pointless, empty marketing phrases.

And, more to the point, the ones who know absolutely nothing about games or the industry.

They get inserted at very senior levels, and are usually plucked from Wall Street or the marketing industry and they get to run a company that they know nothing about. Their business degree tells them to continue doing whatever the last thing was that made money, and that risk is bad. Their sole job then becomes making Wall Street and the investors happy, and this requires making the most money with the fewest overheads. Look at Activision - they've continued to make record earnings year-on-year, and yet what do they do? Shrink the company by 25%, and close a bunch of (talented) studios just because their last game didn't sell a billion squillion units.

Oh, and this brings me to another point - the level below these clueless people are equally clueless sales folk. They have to present a number 12, 18 months away from a game's launch that predicts how many units it will sell. Each year they come under huge pressure from the level above them to "up the numbers". At the same time, the top level also forces the production department to do more with less money and less people. The result? You get an underfunded, understaffed game that has been predicted to sell a ridiculous number of units. It fails to meet the target, the immediate knee-jerk reaction from the CFO/CEO/COO is to keep the Street happy and demonstrate how you're getting rid of dead wood. Does the sales guy go? Nope. The studio gets closed.

I got a bit rambling here, but basically my point is that the large publishers have been overrun by corporate execs that know (and care) nothing for this industry. Just look at who runs the biggies... not a single second of gaming industry experience before they got their jobs. In what other industry is this acceptable? In what other industry would Wall Street traders look at a new CEO appointment who had absolutely zero experience of the company he was about to run and think "oh, great! He was at Procter & Gamble. He'll be perfect. Let's buy more stock"?

So is EA evil? Nope. It's just run by a bunch of people who's priorities are very, very different from yours.

 

[Gamer_152]

Sorry, but I'm just not buying this. I think we all understand "evil" is an exaggeration, but EA are a bad publisher, they're disrespectful and exploitative of their customers, and represent a lot of what is wrong with certain players in the modern games industry.

First of all, okay, to be bought up, development studios or at least the people at the top of development studios must allow EA to do so, but that really doesn't mean that EA shouldn't be held accountable if/when they drive a studio into the ground, even if the other party helped them do it.

Secondly, yes, it's great that they've helped certain studios along their way, and many people ignore this, but they haven't done that out of a sense of charity, and they can still entirely be held responsible for putting the nails in the coffins of many a development studio.

Thirdly, I'm always bemused by people attempting to bring out "but they're a corporation and need to make money" or "every other company is doing it" as arguments in favour of an exploitative company. Being fuelled by personal greed and considering acquiring currency for yourself over making others happy is not a good thing, and these are not the kinds of things we should just wave to one side and say it's okay to do. Additionally whether one person is doing a bad thing or everyone is doing a bad thing, it's still a bad thing, I fail to see an argument otherwise.

Even if I did agree with what you're saying this is just the tip of the iceberg, the problems with EA stretch way beyond getting other studios shut down, and into bad DRM, exploitative DLC, online passes, marketing campaigns which range from lying to people to sending money to reviewers, and more. This is not a company to be given a big pat on the back and excused for treating customers poorly. Yes, every company at some level is out to make money, but the difference between a company like Double Fine and a company like EA, is Double Fine manage to make money and keep their customers happy, EA obviously don't give a crap about their customers.

 

[l0ckd0wn]

So is EA evil? Nope. It's just run by a bunch of people who's priorities are very, very different from yours.

And that gentlemen, and any ladies who happened to wander in here for the donkey show, is the long and short of it. Great post Diamante, however I would argue that profiteering for the sake of profiteering is evil by default, because you have nothing vested and are trying to exploit the market without even knowing how or why it works. Naive becomes indifference which then becomes malevolence; EA is a great example of that...

Which brings us to today's news: EA doesn't erode companies from the inside out, nooooooo...

From Ars Technica: BioWare founders Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk announce retirement [http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/09/bioware-founders-ray-muzyka-and-greg-zeschuk-announce-retirement/]

Zeschuk echoed similar sentiments in his own farewell post: "This decision isn?t without significant pain and regret, but it?s also something I know I need to do, for myself and my family. I?ve reached an unexpected point in my life where I no longer have the passion that I once did for the company, for the games, and for the challenge of creation."

Captcha: ring-fencing

 

[jackalblue3141]

I agree. EA is not evil. Evil requires a certain level of competence EA just can't seem to manage. One day maybe they'll manage it.

 

[Gergar12_v1legacy]

EA is not evil, but I can said its a sellout, greedy, and likes to mike things rather than create it redo. The madden football, soccer are an example. I also see less, and less change with EA. Why couldn't Mass effect 3 had space combat, I would love to control a stealth Frigate armed with anti ship thanix cannons.

 

[Pebkio]

I love how you defend EA by pointing out the sad state of the studios they buy up... and then avoiding the obvious question of why, if they were doing badly, did EA want to buy them.

But aside from that, there is such a thing as a "hostile takeover"... which is basically buying out your company from under you, as opposed to from you. To the regular consumer, it just looks like the company was bought.

---

But aside from that aside, I happen to think of all corporations in practice today to be evil. Because they were created to be evil. A collection of people with the rights of a person, but without the social obligations of that person because it's not really a person... who is also, by contract, required to make the most amount of money as possible without regards to any kind of philanthropist business practices.

This practice is enforced by court precedence and is commonly known as Fiduciary Duty. Most corporate charters includes this clause. At the heart of EA is that practice. I don't care how they appear to the public, they're even worse than your preconceptions can imagine.

For instance, EA doesn't care even a slight tiny speck of a miniscule bit of a sub-atomic particle that you're defending them because it doesn't add anything noticeable to their end-of-quarter profit margins. They view you only as a walking wallet because they'd be slapped by a court injunction if they didn't.

 

[CoS_Dorian]

It's not my intention to be in defense of big companies like EA and the like. Just want to share my 2 cents worth: put those who have been whining about EA's evilness in the position of a decision-maker/profit-receiver, and a great majority of them will do the same, even worse! That's how I see this.

 

[Notere]

No. They're evil. They're in it for the quick buck. Anyone who actually knows anything about them knows it. They are literally willing to drag out lawsuits just to burn a company's money and force them into selling to them before breaking them into pieces and using the name for a cash-out. See: Origin.

Note that there's a studio dedicated to making really shit titles that's called "Bioware-Mythic." Did you know it has nothing to do with either venerated studio that shares its name? That's because they're cashing in on the studio name to make money. And if no one ever blew the whistle, there'd still be this: http://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html

Their abuses are well-documented, and playing them down means you're either ignorant, or paid by them. There is no in-between. They're fit to be a fucking villain in any medium you choose.

 

[Callate]

At the risk of suggesting I have an inflated ego, I'll quote myself in an earlier post:

...but a company like EA shouldn't be in business to make money; they should be in business to make video games. That's their job; that's why they should go to work in the morning. To the extent that they're in business to make money, they're doing that job wrong, and many of their bad decisions can be traced back to exactly that. Perversely, it's ultimately self-defeating: analyzing their customers and treating them like a revenue stream rather than like people causes their use as a revenue stream to diminish (i.e., you piss people off, they stop buying your products.)

 

[crazyrabbits]

The bottom line is their decisions have not always put gamers first. That is why they have the reputation they have. They are no more evil than any other large, publicly traded game publisher.

So, if they're a game publisher that fails to put gamers first, why should they bother continuing to operate as such?

Like Callate just said, they're alienating their main revenue stream (the fans) by treating them as a revenue stream instead of actual people.

They would be better suited trying to sell hardware than creating mass-market products that are dictated by market demographics and potential profit.

 

[Denamic]

Shady business practices, absorbing and destroying game companies, brute forcing Origin, etc.
They fucking piss me off, evil or not.

 

[Ed130 The Vanguard]

Well.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/119650-BioWare-Co-Founders-Retire

Only they and EA know whether they left on their own accord, jumped, or were pushed.

Lets hope its the first option, not the third.

 

[Bertylicious]

I heard that EA shot JFK and taught Germany how to take penalty kicks.

 

[x EvilErmine x]

snip

A soulless machine can't be evil.

But you're missing the point here, a corporation like EA isn't meant to just make money, its supposed to make as much money as possible at the expense of everything else, cutting as many corners as possible, and if ethics are going to get in the way of that, then the ethics are just going to have to take a backseat.

If EA could pay their devs less and treat them even worse than they already do, you can bet your ass they would do it because it would make them more money. If dashing babies on rocks would somehow make EA more money, they would do it. Fortunately dashing babies on rocks would be a pr nightmare and would end up costing them a lot of money, ergo EA's position is firmly against dashing babies on rocks.

What you arent understanding is that EA is the machine that is sucking the creativity out of the medium I love by pushing out games that are easier therefore cheaper to produce for the highest ROI possible. Its the exact same reason why popular music absolute shit these days, because its cheap to produce and people are easily fooled or subdued, what with our fears of fitting in and everything.

for ea, gaming is not a passion, its an equasion

This..oh and welcome to the escapist BTW. Don't go into the basement, yada yada...you'll figure it all out soon enough.

OT
EA are not evil. They just don't care about making games. They care about making money yes, but games? No not so much.

It's going to end up biting them in the ass in the long run though, they may be doing OK now but if they carry on the way they are then in time i can see a problem developing.

You see if you constantly piss off your customers then there will come a time when a significant proportion of them will just stop purchasing your products. Loosing them a lot of the moniez they oh so love. EA need to re-learn the art of being ethical and in touch with it's audience to avoid this[footnote]Which is about as likely as angels flying out of my arse though[/footnote] . And to help them learn this all the people who are offended by their business practices need to stop buying games they publish[footnote]See above footnote[/footnote]. It's the only way they will learn the error of their ways.