Poll: Do you think we're being too harsh or Unfair on E.A's Games recently?

[Zipa]

Its not the games themselves that are the problem, games like ME3 and the new sim city are good games . Its shitty business practices that EA seem to insist on using to turn themselves into gaming biggest assholes that makes them utterly reprehensible.

 

[Shavon513]

It is getting to the point where their business practices are negatively influencing my decision to buy their games. Micro-transactions? Always online DRM? The attempt to efectively kill the used game industry? All of this blows. I am this close to not buying the 3rd Dragon Age game, due to EA rather than the content of the game itself.

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

Ask yourself a few questions. How many studios did they close down? For what reasons? Did they change their business practice after closing down studios to ensure it never happens again? What happened again? And who's next? How many games did they ruin? How did they ruin them?

When you answer those questions you will have a definite answer to your original question. In case you're lazy and want to know the answer right away, here it is:

Spoiler

NO! Fuck EA!

It's painfully obvious that the "generic shooter" argument holds no weight, especially given that ME3 gives you significantly more freedom than any of the previous games to fight battles without firing a single shot.

Mandatory turret sections.

 

[Joccaren]

Well since you mentioned it I will toss Mass Effect 2 out there. There are a ton of people who consider it to be far better then Mass Effect. Also you will be hard pressed to find a Command & Conquer fan that didnt find Westwoods later games better. Hell Red Alert 2 and its expansion are often considered the best in the series. The same can be said with Origin and the Ultima games. Except for the last couple they only got better and better after EA bought them out.

Yeah, but then it came to Tiberium Wars or W/E and a fair bit of hatred began. Maybe it wasn't Tiberium Wars, but I do remember a lot of hate for some the latter C&C games. The pattern I seem to see with EA is that as soon as a company is bought by them they enjoy a brief period of improved releases, and then things go wrong. Games like Mass Effect 2, Red Alert 2, Dragon Age: Origins and such are the middle of their respective series, or thereabouts. Move a bit further on, a game or two, and the hate begins. The pattern seems to fall against EA, but at the same time correlation /= causation, and it could be the developers themselves getting stupid after receiving too much funding. Is a pattern I do notice though, and I can't help but feel it is EA trying to shove business where it doesn't belong, with Micro-transactions, increased action in non-action oriented games to "Get the CoD audience" [I believe the actual quote was more along the lines of "We want the CoD audience, but W/E], stupid DRM, too short development time and various other issues, that causes the death of some great series.

 

[Username Redacted]

EAs game are generally fine. EAs business practices however are getting to the point where they might actually be setting the entire game industry back. I sincerely hope that no other company tries to add microtransactions to a full priced game. I think that their acquisition methods (i.e. buy, milk, close) can fuck right off. I am also surprised that no one has mentioned how awful their advertising campaigns are. Specifically the "Your mother won't like it" BS that tried to sell 'Dead Space 2' and the whatever the hell they had going on in trying to market 'Dante's Inferno'. The game industry doesn't need the incredibly shitty publicity that EA generated for those two games.

 

[Clive Howlitzer]

I don't think so. I don't decide to hate a game released by EA simply because it is being released by EA. However, I always watch and every single one turns into a nightmare, simply because of EA's business practices.
I think the companies need to be held accountable.

 

[Evil Smurf]

We should shun bad business practices. EA is fantastic at bad business practices.

I do find it amusing that the poll has formed an extended middle finger.

I love results like that.

 

[Ed130 The Vanguard]

We should shun bad business practices. EA is fantastic at bad business practices.

I do find it amusing that the poll has formed an extended middle finger.

I love results like that.

Tilts head to the side

Pretty big middle finger.

 

[Little Gray]

Yeah, but then it came to Tiberium Wars or W/E and a fair bit of hatred began. Maybe it wasn't Tiberium Wars, but I do remember a lot of hate for some the latter C&C games. The pattern I seem to see with EA is that as soon as a company is bought by them they enjoy a brief period of improved releases, and then things go wrong. Games like Mass Effect 2, Red Alert 2, Dragon Age: Origins and such are the middle of their respective series, or thereabouts. Move a bit further on, a game or two, and the hate begins. The pattern seems to fall against EA, but at the same time correlation /= causation, and it could be the developers themselves getting stupid after receiving too much funding. Is a pattern I do notice though, and I can't help but feel it is EA trying to shove business where it doesn't belong, with Micro-transactions, increased action in non-action oriented games to "Get the CoD audience" [I believe the actual quote was more along the lines of "We want the CoD audience, but W/E], stupid DRM, too short development time and various other issues, that causes the death of some great series.

I think its often a case of the series going on to long and developers getting stupid with all this new found money. I dont have the article but there was one from Richard Garriot? about the Ultima series and when he sold to EA. He said they had this ton of extra funding and he started to go crazy overboard because he had always worked on a tighter budget before.

 

[someonehairy-ish]

We hate EA for buying studios and then buttfucking them by forcing them to move a franchise in a direction that doesn't make sense, or tacking on multiplayer, or whatever. We hate EA for the DLC and microtransaction bullshit they pull. We hate EA because their service is shitty. For example, I bought the Adventure thingy DLC for spore and added it to my account on one computer. But on a different computer, logging in with the same account, there was for some reason no record that I'd bought the DLC, so I couldn't use it. What's so fucking hard about keeping track of what content I've bought and letting me access it? Imagine if WOW users had bought all the WOW dlc on one computer and then been unable to use it on the same account on another one. There'd be outrage...

Anyway.

Fuck EA, basically.

 

[TwoHeadedBoy]

I think they all certainly deserve criticism in some way, Dead Space 3 for its micro-transactions and Mass Effect 3 for its day one DLC. Though I feel that this can go a bit far in some respects, the behaviour of some of the "fans" during the ending controversy will be something I think we'll all look back on and be quite embarrassed about (I'm not saying that disliking or criticising the ending wasn't appropriate, just the sheer amount of people who interpreted as a personal insult). Usually, EA's publisher bullshit isn't damaging enough to ruin the actual game quality of its AAA titles.

However, if we're criticising Sim City? That is an insult to everyone who bought that game, EA knowingly shipped a broken product and fucked over what could have been a good game purely due to its greed and utter contempt for the consumer. It breaks my heart to think that at some point, the developers were intent on making a good game and one that was worthy of the franchise - just for it to completely flushed away by EA's entitlement towards the loyalty of its customers. Fuck Sim City, fuck it with bells on, fuck it until it's bow-legged and flat out in a pool of its own vomit.

 

[A_Parked_Car]

To be honest, while I do hate EA for it's conintuing bullshit, I'm going to address this as part of the problem.

EA's games are not only becoming increasingly shit (mediocre graphics, bland gameplay that tries to copy CoD or Gears of War), but even if they are high quality they're becoming increasingly hard to access, always on DRM, and well, that's really all I need to say.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/7.402948-Thousands-Sign-Petition-Demanding-Removal-of-SimCity-DRM

Read that article, see that, it's bad enough people are signing a petition, A LOT OF PEOPLE. Always online DRM isn't new, people have been saying how much they dislike it for a while. It's no secret. And happy customers = more money. Yet EA didn't listen again, and EA's stocks have been going down for a while now too, they don't seem to grasp this concept, they whine about pirates, whine about artistic integrity, and whine their customers, they try to solve by giving us free games, but we never asked for a free game, we asked for the game we paid for to work.

I have been watching the SimCity disaster closely. I was actually seriously considering buying SimCity when it was first announced, since SimCity 3000 was glorious. However, my interest waned as soon as it was made clear it would be online only with irritating multiplayer.

Really, what I was saying with my post was that I don't unconditionally hate every game EA publishes, just because they published it. However, I'm certainly far more cautious with my money when EA is involved. I still stand by Battlefield 3 as a great game, even though it is shackled to Origin. Origin really isn't all that bad, it is just a mediocre version of Steam.

I certainly won't be buying Battlefield 4, or any other game I can concieve of EA publishing in the near future. Nothing they have announced interests me in the slightest. My interest peaked slighty when I saw the announcment for C&C: Generals 2, then they turned it into a F2P game with emphasis on multiplayer and I stopped caring again.

 

[TrevHead]

No, I Wouldn't say I HATE EA anymore than any other shitty corporate company but how they are manipulative with their monetisation is ruining their games. I'm just glad others are waking up to the fact that EA games aren't worth buying and there are other game makers out there that don't feel like cow clickers.

Looking back to how this forum was 1 or 2 years ago, you could be forgiven for mistaking this place for a EA site as nearly everyone played the same EA / Bioware games.