Andy of Comix Inc said:
Any company that alienates its fanbase with every move it makes, claiming to do so for them, is akin to a company that spits in your eye and tells you you asked for it. The nitty gritty business side? Yeah, it's kinda awful. But EA is an insulting company. Everything it does in an insult to those who like its products, and to videogames in general. People feel insulted by EA's very presence.
Exactly. This is where my disgust with EA comes from. Every time I hear one of their "creative" producers or CEOs speak up, I feel incredibly insulted. Either by the utter stupidity of the person talking or the fact that they seemingly
know they're peddling bullshit but just expect me to bend over and take it.
Take the recent examples of their ad campaigns for Dead Space 2 and Origin.
The former involved the
brilliant tag line, "Your mom's going to hate it." This not only shows the lack of thought on EAs part but also shows how they view us, the gamers. They literally consider all of us as childish little shits who are only interested in ultra violence, following the crowd, and pissing of mommy and daddy.
That latter, which should have been about what benefits one gets from using Origin, involved nothing more than a smear campaign against
everyone else. Instead of playing up what Origin gave you, they simply told people that they
HAD to use it for their games and that they
should use it because everyone else is so "bad".
Hell, they even took pot shots at Activision and Call of Duty as a selling point for Origin. I mean, what the bloody fuck EA?
Worse was their (admittedly almost brilliant if sinister) plan to smear the name of Steam. It didn't involve pointing out the actual flaws of Steam or any such thing (which would have been easy to do, even if Origin doesn't exactly "fix" those flaws), it was all about creating strange situations and then PR spinning it to make EA look like the "poor, innocent publisher being hounded by the big, mean 'ole Valve".
Take Crysis 2, for example. It was originally on Steam; as well as other DD services. When EA decided to bring it to Origin, they came up with a plan. That plan involved all-but strong-arming Crytek into signing an agreement wherein the Origin version of Crysis 2 would be the only version to receive future DRM, patches, and updates.
As a result, Valve looked at this "deal" and basically said, "Um...yeah. Screw that. We're not going to sell nerfed, broken versions of this game to our users that literally have no chance of being fixed. Especially when this other version will be updated and we're forced to sell our version at the same price as the better version."
This was when Valve decided to pull the game from the store. Anyone who'd already bought it could still access it from their account at any time. They simply wouldn't be selling more copies.
As soon as this happened, EA started spinning. They immediately released several press-releases proclaiming Valve "had restrictive DLC policies that prevented EA from providing the best possible product to the users". And, that Valve "removed the game because it didn't give them the profit control they wanted."
This happened with Dragon Age 2 as well.
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So basically, a combination of these things above, as well as several other grievances, are why I "hate" EA. They started as a company that gave a shit about gamers and gaming. They wanted to create great works and pursue original ideas. But now? It's nothing but profit margins and "fuck the gamers". After all, we're nothing more than "entitled whiners". Right?
