Evil? No. People who call EA evil with a straight face need a serious reality check over what real 'evil' actually looks like.
There are, however, plenty of legitimate reasons to dislike them.
Yes, they are a for-profit company and they need to make money. That's no skin off my nose. What bothers me is that they seem to be completely clueless about it. They blow vast and entirely unnecessary amounts of money on marketing campaigns (all of which seem to end up completely missing the mark anyway, so they might as well have been going round chucking huge wads of the games budget out of the windows of moving cars), and then, because of that, putting a massive Sword of Damocles over the developers by giving them stupidly unrealistic sales targets (that will not be reached, partly thanks to aforementioned shitty marketing), then shutting down entire franchises at the drop of a hat when they fail to reach said targets.
I also accept that EA can't afford to take as many risks as an indie developer, nor did I ever expect them too. However, that does not mean it's a good move to make every IP they own as homogenised as possible. It's counter-intuitive. If they make everything they own look the same as everything that they're trying to compete with in the market, then their products aren't going to stand out among all the already over-saturated genre's of the medium, nor spark the interest of any demographics that their competitors are not catering for, which would seem to me like the perfect way to one-up your rivals. For example, people who already play Dead Space have no interest in playing a co-op action shooter in the Dead Space franchise, and people who already play co-op action shooters have no interest in jumping on to the Dead Space franchise just for the third installment. Therefore, homogenising Dead Space 3 in order to make it 'appeal to a wider audience' will have exactly the opposite effect, and was a stupid idea.
I don't mind my businessmen being greedy. That comes with the territory. I do mind when my businessmen are incompetent, and that's my problem with EA. They're incompetent.