EA are getting worse. We're beginning to see that they really don't care about their customers, not in the slightest. Their business practices could be considered unethical for a number of reasons. There are those who complain but keep buying their games, and their are those who outright refuse to buy their games.
EA are a business. They don't care at all if you complain. They don't care what you think of them, or what you post about them on the internet. A business measures success in sales. If you buy their games,they consider you a customer. They consider their game a success, they don't need to improve, and they expect you to buy the next game they publish. If you buy their games, that literally suggests to EA that they're doing nothing wrong, regardless of your 'feedback'. A sale is a success, and as long as you'll buy it, they won't fix it.
There are also those who say, "it doesn't affect me, so I don't care". Fair enough. You buy games that you find fun, and you don't care about the horrible business practices or the suffering of other players. But it's a very slippery slope. If you tell them "I don't care, I'll keep buying!" then they'll continue on this gradual decline in service and quality. It'll get to a point where it does affect you, you no longer want this, but you've already missed the chance to do something about it.
What are these bad business practices? For those who don't know, I'll explain.
1. EA's customer support is notoriously bad. It reflects how little they care about their customers.
In my own experience, and the experience of a lot of other gamers that I've heard of, EA's customer service is terrible. Before you can contact them at all, you need to fill in a form on their website. This form determines how 'important' your problem is, and then gives you options of how to contact EA. Their phone number isn't openly available - they'll only tell you it if this form deems YOUR problem important enough to require phoning them. Otherwise they'll either send you to live chat or, even worse, only allow you to email them.
Their live chat is abhorrent. The representatives are often very hard to understand due to (and I mean them no offence, but it's true and a valid problem) their lack of English skill, and they generally have little to no knowledge of the games that they're providing support for. They also don't seem to care. On a lot of occasions (you can find examples online) they outright ignore the problem and give an automated message along the lines of "Is there anything else I can help you with?". They often don't give a solution, but since the automated form decides how you can contact EA, you can't get further help.
The forum support is equally bad. There are multiple instance of widespread problems with games, even so much that the game just doesn't work, and the forum support simply stops replying. They offer no fix, no way to give feedback. They just stop replying.
EA also don't offer refunds. Even in the case of SimCity, which is notorious for massive, huge gamebreaking bugs at launch (and for at least a month after, with even some features of the game being turned off to ease server load) such as saving issues which caused rollbacks/deletions and even server problems which stopped people playing, EA refused to give refunds. The only option for a lot of people was to initiate a chargeback with their credit card companies, which would most likely result in a ban from Origin - making people unable to play ANY of their EA games on PC.
2. Day-one DLC
This is a practice becoming more widespread in the industry, and it's terrible. Developers are working on DLC while they work on the game; this generally means that they take away resources from developing the game and put them into developing the DLC. Considering how many games have been released broken or unfinished (consider SimCity as broken, or Mass Effect 3's ending as unfinished), this is a huge problem - instead of finishing or fixing the game for release, they spend their resources on making more content that they can sell on top of the game.
This is a nasty concept. It's effectively taking away a chunk of the game's content - it was ready for release, so it could have been included in the game - and selling it separately, purely to make more money. The gamer pays for the game, with that content missing, and then pays for the content.
There have already been DLCs announced for Battlefield 4. Not one DLC, but two. The console hasn't even been released, let alone the game. How many resources did they use on that DLC?
3. Greedy micro-transactions
For those who don't know, micro-transactions are in-game items bought for real money. They are commonly used in free-to-play games as a business model, which is fair enough: the developers need to make money somehow. But EA includes them in their games. Charging players for items in a game they've paid full-price for? In my eyes, that's not acceptable.
It was stated that micro-transactions are optional: they're there for players that want them, but there's no pressure. That simply isn't true. Players will always take the easiest route to winning a game - that's how games work. So when given the option to pay real money to get in-game benefits, there is pressure to take it. Not taking that option means a disadvantage.
Why should people who have paid for a full game be milked for more money whilst they play? Do you want to spend your time while you play games thinking and worrying about all the extra money you're spending, or the advantage you're missing out on?
4. Digital rights management: controlling when and how you play games
Origin was an attempt at enforcing DRM on PC players: they'd always need to be online, running their games through the Origin platform, so that the games could less easily be pirated. It'd save EA money, but it's a massive inconvenience to the players.
Origin had a lot of problems when it was launched. It was beta software, and yet players had no choice but to run their games through it. Some people couldn't play games at all due to Origin problems.
It also meant that players were forced to be permanently online to play any games - even single-player. This is a massive inconvenience to the player. If your internet service provider has problems, you can't play your games. If EA's servers go down, you can't play your games. The sole reason for this is to protect EA's sales, but it takes away consumers' rights to the products they paid for.
Ironically, it's far more convenient to pirate games due to Origin.
5. It's okay you release games unplayable. We can fix them in a few months.
As I mentioned earlier, SimCity literally couldn't be played on release. Even still, 3 months on, it has some major bugs. There was a beta. So why didn't they find these bugs? It's simple: it wasn't really a beta. It was a glorified demo to generate hype. The beta was restricted to one hour of play mostly consisting of a tutorial, with a lot of features blocked. They didn't give people a chance to test the game at all.
Still, they must have known the bugs were there. Some of them were glaringly obvious and very common, so it can be assumed that quality assurance testers would have noticed. The game was released as it was, however. Over the course of months, patches were released, each time fixing some of these problems. The game still isn't completely fixed. And even while the game was broken, EA were still producing DLC: the Nissan Leaf is one of a few examples of product placement DLC. Yes, if you download a Nissan Leaf (advertisement for Nissan, which EA gets paid for) and use it in your game, you get gameplay advantages. No downsides. So it's essential DLC.
The game was ruined for people who bought it at release. Do you really want to buy games in the future, after getting excited about them, to find yourself unable to play them because they were released broken and unfinished?
I do hope this list shows you why EA is bad and why, even if these problems don't affect you, you should stop buying from them until they change their ways. Maybe if we get the message across now they won't ruin the new Star Wars Battlefront.
EA are a business. They don't care at all if you complain. They don't care what you think of them, or what you post about them on the internet. A business measures success in sales. If you buy their games,they consider you a customer. They consider their game a success, they don't need to improve, and they expect you to buy the next game they publish. If you buy their games, that literally suggests to EA that they're doing nothing wrong, regardless of your 'feedback'. A sale is a success, and as long as you'll buy it, they won't fix it.
There are also those who say, "it doesn't affect me, so I don't care". Fair enough. You buy games that you find fun, and you don't care about the horrible business practices or the suffering of other players. But it's a very slippery slope. If you tell them "I don't care, I'll keep buying!" then they'll continue on this gradual decline in service and quality. It'll get to a point where it does affect you, you no longer want this, but you've already missed the chance to do something about it.
What are these bad business practices? For those who don't know, I'll explain.
1. EA's customer support is notoriously bad. It reflects how little they care about their customers.
In my own experience, and the experience of a lot of other gamers that I've heard of, EA's customer service is terrible. Before you can contact them at all, you need to fill in a form on their website. This form determines how 'important' your problem is, and then gives you options of how to contact EA. Their phone number isn't openly available - they'll only tell you it if this form deems YOUR problem important enough to require phoning them. Otherwise they'll either send you to live chat or, even worse, only allow you to email them.
Their live chat is abhorrent. The representatives are often very hard to understand due to (and I mean them no offence, but it's true and a valid problem) their lack of English skill, and they generally have little to no knowledge of the games that they're providing support for. They also don't seem to care. On a lot of occasions (you can find examples online) they outright ignore the problem and give an automated message along the lines of "Is there anything else I can help you with?". They often don't give a solution, but since the automated form decides how you can contact EA, you can't get further help.
The forum support is equally bad. There are multiple instance of widespread problems with games, even so much that the game just doesn't work, and the forum support simply stops replying. They offer no fix, no way to give feedback. They just stop replying.
EA also don't offer refunds. Even in the case of SimCity, which is notorious for massive, huge gamebreaking bugs at launch (and for at least a month after, with even some features of the game being turned off to ease server load) such as saving issues which caused rollbacks/deletions and even server problems which stopped people playing, EA refused to give refunds. The only option for a lot of people was to initiate a chargeback with their credit card companies, which would most likely result in a ban from Origin - making people unable to play ANY of their EA games on PC.
2. Day-one DLC
This is a practice becoming more widespread in the industry, and it's terrible. Developers are working on DLC while they work on the game; this generally means that they take away resources from developing the game and put them into developing the DLC. Considering how many games have been released broken or unfinished (consider SimCity as broken, or Mass Effect 3's ending as unfinished), this is a huge problem - instead of finishing or fixing the game for release, they spend their resources on making more content that they can sell on top of the game.
This is a nasty concept. It's effectively taking away a chunk of the game's content - it was ready for release, so it could have been included in the game - and selling it separately, purely to make more money. The gamer pays for the game, with that content missing, and then pays for the content.
There have already been DLCs announced for Battlefield 4. Not one DLC, but two. The console hasn't even been released, let alone the game. How many resources did they use on that DLC?
3. Greedy micro-transactions
For those who don't know, micro-transactions are in-game items bought for real money. They are commonly used in free-to-play games as a business model, which is fair enough: the developers need to make money somehow. But EA includes them in their games. Charging players for items in a game they've paid full-price for? In my eyes, that's not acceptable.
It was stated that micro-transactions are optional: they're there for players that want them, but there's no pressure. That simply isn't true. Players will always take the easiest route to winning a game - that's how games work. So when given the option to pay real money to get in-game benefits, there is pressure to take it. Not taking that option means a disadvantage.
Why should people who have paid for a full game be milked for more money whilst they play? Do you want to spend your time while you play games thinking and worrying about all the extra money you're spending, or the advantage you're missing out on?
4. Digital rights management: controlling when and how you play games
Origin was an attempt at enforcing DRM on PC players: they'd always need to be online, running their games through the Origin platform, so that the games could less easily be pirated. It'd save EA money, but it's a massive inconvenience to the players.
Origin had a lot of problems when it was launched. It was beta software, and yet players had no choice but to run their games through it. Some people couldn't play games at all due to Origin problems.
It also meant that players were forced to be permanently online to play any games - even single-player. This is a massive inconvenience to the player. If your internet service provider has problems, you can't play your games. If EA's servers go down, you can't play your games. The sole reason for this is to protect EA's sales, but it takes away consumers' rights to the products they paid for.
Ironically, it's far more convenient to pirate games due to Origin.
5. It's okay you release games unplayable. We can fix them in a few months.
As I mentioned earlier, SimCity literally couldn't be played on release. Even still, 3 months on, it has some major bugs. There was a beta. So why didn't they find these bugs? It's simple: it wasn't really a beta. It was a glorified demo to generate hype. The beta was restricted to one hour of play mostly consisting of a tutorial, with a lot of features blocked. They didn't give people a chance to test the game at all.
Still, they must have known the bugs were there. Some of them were glaringly obvious and very common, so it can be assumed that quality assurance testers would have noticed. The game was released as it was, however. Over the course of months, patches were released, each time fixing some of these problems. The game still isn't completely fixed. And even while the game was broken, EA were still producing DLC: the Nissan Leaf is one of a few examples of product placement DLC. Yes, if you download a Nissan Leaf (advertisement for Nissan, which EA gets paid for) and use it in your game, you get gameplay advantages. No downsides. So it's essential DLC.
The game was ruined for people who bought it at release. Do you really want to buy games in the future, after getting excited about them, to find yourself unable to play them because they were released broken and unfinished?
I do hope this list shows you why EA is bad and why, even if these problems don't affect you, you should stop buying from them until they change their ways. Maybe if we get the message across now they won't ruin the new Star Wars Battlefront.
