Give me your opinions about EA (Leave out ME3)

[Snotnarok]

They're a giant company who's a bit disorganized that like any company wants money, and despite being far from the worst I've seen (Activision, Ubisoft) they get the most heat for some reason.

Either way I don't care about EA, I'm just glad they don't shove shitty DRM in their games for the most part.

 

[MetallicaRulez0]

Typical large corporation. They're after profits and don't really care who they have to go through to get them. Nothing especially evil, at least by big corporation standards.

 

[SajuukKhar]

I dont like many of EA's practices but out of Ea, Activison, and Ubisoft I find myself playing Ea games more often and finding them better.

 

[Eric Morales]

EA, to paraphrase Douglas Adamas, is really really big. This is the economist in me speaking, but the worst quality you could ascribe to the company is that of ruthless self interest. Even that quality can be molded to serve the greater good so long as we consumers do our part.

Lets assume that EA is staffed entirely by a combination of cartoonish supervillains and massive idiots whose only desire is the pursuit of profit. They're only going to make money if we buy their games, if we buy their good games while leaving their shit games to rot on the shelves, that ought to make them less willing to green light shit games in the future. Its an imperfect solution, but this is an imperfect world. The best we can do is vote with our pocket books.

As for EA, they've published some good games, hell they've even published some GREAT games in addition to publishing their share of tripe. I think its hyperbolic to treat them like an unambiguous force for evil.

On the other hand, I'd say the employees of their marketing department seem to have paving stones for brains. I think many of us remember the Dante's Inferno mess. Then there were all those commercials for Mass Effect that tried to sell it like a generic testosterone flooded military shooter. The one I still remember is that cringe worthy "Your mom will hate this game" campaign for Dead Space 2. Now, Dead Space 2 isn't a great game, but NO game deserved to be marketed like that.

 

[arnoldthebird]

They are huge and successful, and will not stop what they are doing because they make a metric fuck ton of cash. They release some fantastic game's too, I can see why there is hate....but if people keep buying then EA makes money, and if they are making money they'll keep doing what they are doing

 

[mysecondlife]

I'm ok with them. To me, they're another game publishing company.

Only game I bought from them are The Sims and Mass Effect 2. So they had no chance to screw me over.

 

[mfeff]

If I owned stock in them, I'd sell it.

In November 2011 I didn't own any stock in Electronic Arts but began selling the stock short. Recently (over the past two weeks) began the process of deleveraging... to avoid getting caught in an aggressive options position... although probably just a little "too" soon, as it is now trading for just under 15.50 US a share. Maybe it's time to go long?

As far as companies go... on paper they are really pretty decent but they are consistently under performing. Cash solvent, good I.P., no debt... so on and so forth.

Downside is that they have caught the "allergic to innovation" bug that is very common with American businesses. By this I mean that the strategy (laughingly) is to create an atmosphere in which titles may be pumped out year after year like the sports games, MMO, portable applications.

They are big enough that in some respects what they seem to want to do is eliminate competitive products or simply buy them up, reducing consumer options, then saturating a marketplace with their own I.P. Similar to a "purchase for resale". In one respect it is similar to a chemical company such as Dupont, but without the technical expertise at the top.

In the long term it is a sound idea, however, in the short term games such as SWTOR with production and advertising cost hitting 250~300 million + dollars, lack luster subscriptions, and frequent churn... coupled with problematic games such as ME 3 (which has really soured the Kool Aid) the company has demonstrated a mediocre return on dollar invested.

As such it has been more profitable to parasite or wolf pack them. Being the case, investors thinking they were buying into the next big thing, have been taken for a very painful ride all the way down to the ground.

Over the next quarter or two the difficulty for them as a company is having products that are attractive to customers to spite the reputation of the company as a whole.

In Short:

The Good

Strong I.P.
Strong industry presence
Strong financials
Excellent distribution chain

The Bad

Top Heavy impotent management
Aversion to innovation
Wal-Mart attitude towards growth (questionable formula)
Out of touch with market place coupled with poor quality assurance

The Ugly

P.R. is in the toilet (near shattered consumer confidence)
Creative accounting is better than creative products?
Products trending towards a lack of synergy.

As an investor there are several items that would have to be addressed before one could really take the company seriously as a vehicle for portfolio investment in the short term. Although in the long term, they are probably "ok" for keeping up with inflation and other factors.

 

[malestrithe]

EA is the villain of the month in the gaming community, a position that it tends to share with activision almost equally.

I'm guessing that Activision has not done anything too outrageous lately.

 

[JaceArveduin]

Battle for Middle-Earth II's expansion got 1 official patch, EA are a bastards to be honest.

Though if they come out with BFMEIII, I'll probably buy it *grumbles about being such a Tolkien fan*

 

[Flailing Escapist]

They don't do anything wrong from a business stand point, that's kinda why they're so big. But they're so short sighted and short term they fumble smaller studios and tend to focus on on lot of the wrong things (again, not from a business stand point). They're just... soooooo now-not-tomorrow. If they could give into the fanbases they suck up with out out right pandering to them they would bring in even more fans and expand possiblities for the future. They are so short term it's stunning.

And they've ruined some of my favorite studios but that's just a side effect of that.

 

[4ged]

i realy want to know where you got your expertise on what qualifys you on any of EAs policy's last time i checked EA still makes money and your some dude on the interwebs, point goes to EA on this,

Congratulations. You have officially used the same logic as Twilight fans who tell me that I can't say the movies sucked because no movie I have ever made was the number one movie in America. I hope you enjoy their company.

lol twilight was a terrible movie but made money off of morons who bought into the shit they where peddling, kinda sounds like what EA does so i fail to see your problem with a company taking advantage of retards who buy there shit regardless, doesn't seem to affect you in the slightest, though it is funny that you think that EAs and now Twilight's profits somehow are an insult to your intelligence and the integrity of your existence.

oh and acting like an internet tough guy is conformation that you have been trolled hard, that is all.

 

[synobal]

EA has the problem most corporations have these days. They focus so much on short term quarterly profits and their stock price that they end up hurting themselves in the long run by short term cash grabs. Also the recession has made them less willing to take risks so they try to stick to 'safe games' rather than trying anything new but this is typical of most big publishers right now.

 

[Agayek]

I take issue with their DLC policies, though admittedly they are not as bad as some; with Origin being a colossal piece of shit that they keep trying to bludgeon their customers into using with all the subtlety of fucking Little Boy; and the fact that they have demonstrably ruined, at minimum, half a dozen formerly amazing studios.

EA is a blight on the industry, and they really need to go away. The entirety of the current publishing model does, really. I would be ecstatic if the recent upsurge in Kickstarter crowdsourcing to fund titles becomes the new industry norm. It would mean smaller, less visually-advanced games, but it also means that developers have actual creative control over the product and it doesn't get shit all over by the current publishing process.

 

[Starik20X6]

Eh, can't name an EA game off the top of my head that I have any interest or investment in, so I can't really get on a soapbox about them for anything.

 

[LetalisK]

snip

Hm. What I took from that is the video games industry is in dire need of intelligent regulation as companies are now legally conducting themselves akin to the old oil barons and railroad tycoons.

 

[Spearmaster]

EA kills all it touches imo, haven't bought anything from them in over 3 years, I don't hate them but im not gonna support the things they are doing to make a quick buck, usually game company s make money with new and interesting ideas, not holding games and franchises we love hostage.

 

[Callate]

Let's say I'm not buying any games from them any more. And I did, for a long, long time. I bought them when they came in cardboard sleeves on floppy disks.

Their behavior has increasingly suggested a genuine disdain for their customers. Whether it's the "Your Mom will hate this" ads for Dead Space 2, or the fake picketers they hired to protest Dante's Inferno; the restructuring of franchises like Command & Conquer and Populous and Syndicate into things their fanbases never wanted them to be; their pioneering of shady ways to make their existing customers put more money into games they've bought; or the myriad ways they've unified their games under a shadow that takes rights away from their customers and made them afraid, or unable, to complain about mistreatment in any meaningful way. The last thing EA did that I unequivocally approved of was to kick Tim Langdell to the curb in court, and that was some time ago, now.

Part of me wants to say they're focus-tested to death, but I almost can't believe it. Their actions speak of legal departments that say "We've got to have this in the contract; don't worry, no one will read it" and marketing departments that scream "It's edgy, it's real, it will bring in the 18-25 year olds" and research departments that murmur "It's got to have an Internet-wide multiplayer component or no one will pay it any attention", and no one at all saying to the legions and legions of actual gamers who buy their products, "So, do you want Sim City to be built around Internet-wide multiplayer? Do you want a first-person shooter with a very loose association with an game a company we swallowed over a decade ago made? If we were to say that you had to install an unnecessary piece of software to play a long-awaited game and in doing so turn over a bunch of private information and possibly give up a number of legal rights, would that be a problem?"

The truth of the matter is, at this point, I would have to hear something pretty close to an apology to come back to EA. They've built a wall of "You people don't understand, this is industry standard, we support our designers, We know what we're doing", a wall that seems to all but prevent them from hearing that there are real problems with how they're interacting with their customers. The only way I can touch them at all anymore is to stop giving them my money, and they've made my doing so into an act tied to deeply held conviction: I cannot be part, even in my tiny way, of letting game companies in general and EA in particular think that this way of doing business is somehow acceptable.

They act like they hate us. There are only so many ways you can respond to that if you have any dignity.

 

[drednoahl]

EA are bloated marketers of safe bets; a once respected purveyor of quality and innovative products driven by artistic integrity now reduced to being mafioso-like thugs to their devs, clients and customers.

These days EA are pretty much irrelevant to me, though I remember that while Trip was in charge things weren't so bad and I did like them. Now they just a group of schoolyard bullies preying on the weak, and I don't support bullies in any form.