Starik20X6 said:
Jim Sterling psychically pre-empted your question, and made this handy video for you [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/jimquisition/5946-Why-Do-People-Hate-EA].
The one TC talked about in the OP and said it didn't give him the information? Yes, I'm sure watching that would help.
OT: Actually, I don't think I can add much to the video. The closing down of companies has been mentioned, but also there are the bad business practices - Day 1/on-disc DLC[footnote]For the record, I am absolutely fine with the idea behind those. But there are concerns that they could be misused. And EA has shown that we shouldn't trust them not to abuse the thing[/footnote], trying to charge customers more for buying second hand games, making games for the sake of making more products, as opposed to making them good (yearly releases and "widening the target audience"), to build on that - monopoly over the sports games, which lets them do whatever they want with those (every year, too).
Other than those, there is the fact that they treat their customers...below the reasonable expectations, so to say. They've thrown some ridiculous DRM at things and only hurt their legitimate customers. Case in point: Spore - it had to have the DRM stripped down a lot, due to an avalanche of complains about
people who couldn't play the game. At all. The one they bough and it told them "Trololo, no you don't get to do that!". I am pretty sure that had something to do with the high piracy rate there[footnote]For the record, Spore was the most pirated game for 2008, according to TorrentFreak. And it was released in September, so it got the most downloads in less than 3 months. Also, for reference, it had 1 700 000 downloads, while the second one (Sims 2) had 1 150 000[/footnote] - legitimate customers were most probably
forced to pirate it, in order to play it. Aside from this basic disregard of people, EA is well known to have banned people and denied them access to their games for, get this, complaining on their forums. "Hey I don't like X..." "Sorry Fuck you, you won't be playing any of our games any more." You have to admit, OP, that is pretty disgusting thing to do.