Is EA Really That Evil?

[Lightknight]

Actually EA is guilty of fraud and false advertising which are major crimes in the business world,they also were taken to court for making spyware in Europe when Origin was first implemented.

A few things:

1. You're confusing being sued over something or being taken to court over something with actually being guilty of something. EA did not falsely advertise the game from what I can tell, they did fail to scale the product (Battlefield 4/Sim City 5) with the amount of traffic they actually got. Saying they falsely advertised because the product had issues would be like saying that DropBox is guilty of falsely advertising their service because they had a day of downtime last week whereas part of their product is being able to access data from elsewhere at any time. That's silly and not likely to hold up. The fraud component would stick if they KNEW that Battlefield 4 was going to have these issues and didn't appropriately inform investors (or directly lied to them). That's really hard to stick. But let me let you in on something. If you own a single share of a company's stock then you are able to sue the company. Hell, you can sue anyone you want to for anything. It'll likely be thrown out if it's off the wall crazy, but you can do it.

As for the shenanigans in Europe. They have a long history of taking everyone to court over these things. Spyware is a very loose term and checking to see if your customers have legally purchased your games is not an inherrently evil thing. Invasive? Yeah. Evil? no.

2. There are lots of things that are illegal which are not evil. Speeding =/= evil. Even committing an evil action does not make you inherently evil.

3. EA has also made efforts to make amends for people they've wronged. They give the users what they can at no cost to the user. Things like free games to DLC. It's not much, but it's more than other companies do when they fail.

As for hiring people to act as slaves....EA has been guilty of overworking their employees in the past and several development teams had left the company because of it,

Did they get paid a legal wage and have the ability to leave at any time? Yeah? Then they're not slaves.

they force their remaining teams to push out games that aren't ready or put in features that are designed to gouge money out of their customers and when the eventual backlash happens EA forces the game dev to take the fall for them.

Ok? So they produce a bad quality product. I remind you that the topic of the thread is about them being morally evil. Devil's incarnate bent on malicious intent. They're basically a hotdog stand that puts out shitty undercooked hotdogs and charges you extra for the condiments. That's not evil, it's just bad business that drives you to go elsewhere. They deserve to lose business, not go to hell.

Not to mention they have a monopoly on all sports games and currently the owners of the Star Wars IP so that's another monopoly for them.

... Owning an IP isn't being a monopoly. Even if it's the most popular one. It's just owning the IP. Every IP has an owner or owners. Every company with an IP has a monopoly on that IP. That's not the type of monopoly that people are talking about when companies get charged with having a monopoly or ogliopoly. You can develop a sports game and sell it and consumers can buy it. You can potentially acquire licensing rights from the NFL to use their IP like EA did. If it was impossible for you to even make a sports game because EA had a monopoly on that genre for some reason then it would be bad.

Ang again, monopolies aren't inherently evil. They just create an environment that can be adversarial towards consumers. For example, I live in a city that up until about ten years ago only had one option to go to for cable. This created an environment where they could name their price and if you wanted internet or TV you had to pay it or go without. However, the company did not charge a terrible price, they just had terrible customer service. It could have done both. Monopolies are generally only pursued in court if they are adversarial.

Did I at any point say that EA is evil?No,I made a point as to why people would see them as such by listing the amount of things they have done that were hostile to the consumer.But if you want to drop the discussion then fine by me.

Our argument is almost exclusively against the term evil. No one is arguing that EA hasn't made stupid business decisions that are anti-consumers.

 

[Pr0]

There was a definitive point in the industry where EA was kind of the white knight compared to the diabolical demon that is Activision. Unfortunately EA's obligations to shareholders required it to take drastic emulatory action of its own competition simply to stay profitable and thus it became what it is now....the worst company in America for two years running.

I mean think about it, in 2009 or so every title that was worth your hype meter was coming out of an EA backed dev house. The problem is EA molded those titles in a direct bid to kick the legs out from under Activision and failed at every turn to do so.

You can't take Star Wars and make World of Warcraft again and expect people not to notice, gamers simply aren't that dumb...but EA did it and BioWare paid for it in spades as their collective company integrity, at least in the eyes of the consumer, got completely trashed.

Dragon Age was fantastic and DA2 "wasn't that bad" but the problem is going from fantastic achievements of new and original game concepts to "not that bad" is not how you want a franchise to go, EA doesn't care, it just wants the money because its got quarterly shareholder meetings to account profits to.

Mass Effect was the greatest modern sci-fi epic of this generation and it was thrown into the toilet by Mac Walters and Casey Hudson based on direct business decisions to kill the story arc to create a sustainable franchise from it....because ME as it was, was not a sustainable franchise, it had a direct and definitive "end" no matter how far you dragged it out, that doesn't work under the EA business model, creating a work of art and letting it stand for all time as..definitively a work of art doesn't make any profit. So..it had to be killed, so it could live again as Zombie Mass Effect, that will never die and just keeps getting a new number every couple of years.

Battlefield? Lets not even go there I've already described it as a non-game that is simply a 100 million dollar dick waving contest with Bobby Kotick...that frankly...EA continues to lose. This doesn't even cover MOH Warfighter which was a dismal failure to attempt to launch two military shooter franchises to compete with Activision.

Then theres SimCity.....10 updates in and they're finally adding offline mode...which for awhile will be like "OMG thats all we ever wanted" but the real story behind that is EA no longer wants to deal with the overhead expense of maintaining the servers, giving the game offline single player play allows them to scale back their server support heavily to just leaderboards and global stats and thats not half as intensive. People think EA is giving them what they want with update 10 for SimCity, what they're really getting is what EA wants, a way to trim costs and still ensure people got the product they paid for.

Then the Sims franchise, if ever a franchise has been back alley pumped for every dollar its been able to grab its this one. The Sims 3 is one bug ridden mess of expansion after expansion, the base game plays fairly well but if you have like..every expansion that TS3 possibly has...even without using mods to make the game less visually offensive, the interoperability issues between the various expansions and routing problems make the game nearly unplayable..but I guess if theres one thing they can count on is that the virtual barbie market is never going to run out of money.

FIFA and Madden aren't really games I keep up with as they're console only but I believe they just recently tanked the FIFA franchise pretty badly and Madden may be their only leg in the game in that market.

Simple facts are, EA isn't evil, its profit driven and by being driven by profit, it is hostile to competitors and constantly attempting to leverage products into the market that can take the money their competitors are making. Its hostile business theory, rather than letting their products stand on their own strengths, which as stated about 7 years ago I was literally buying EA backed titles on faith alone (something I won't even do today) they'd be just fine. But because of this predatory business practice of "Whats yours is mine" that seems to pervade the business end of what EA is today, they seem extremely evil and willing to do whatever they can to make a profit as compared to being happy with making a profit simply by doing good things.

EA can get not evil. They have the product base to do it they just have to focus more on letting the titles stand as art rather than franchises. They need to stop this silly Origin dance and shake hands with Gabe Newell and be Steam's best buddy cause accessibility is a big deal and I don't personally like having to split my games between two digital content delivery applications especially when one of them only rarely has a title I might be interested on it and the other has pretty much the other 90% of the games industry available to the PC.

EA needs to get back into good business with Valve, it needs to get back into good business with the consumer and it most definitely needs to get back into good business of letting its associated studios do what they do best, and realize that not everything needs an infinite franchise to be profitable. It can be profitable and it can end, and those profits can back and fund new ideas that can be just as great, without the need for constant serialization of established hits.

 

[Someone Depressing]

They ruined Ultima, and that's one of their more savoury sins.

"what's a Paladin?"

*breaks into an uncontrollabe rage*

 

[Seracen]

There will be no shortage of well made (and poorly made) points to the affirmative in this thread.

Having said that, I once loved Electronic Arts. Even still, by sheer dint of licensing, I would be sad if all their titles went away. However, as an umbrella company, and considering their business practices, they are detestable.

Turning a profit is not synonymous with screwing over fans (which hurts their revenue in the long term) and subsidiaries (which weakens their holdings long term). EA is a perfect case of a company which had a good thing, but screwed it all up looking for immediate gains.

Fittingly, the (relatively meager) profits garnered from these strategies seem to have been quickly offset by the repercussions of adopting them.

 

[Artaneius]

Last game I bought published by EA was Dragon Age Origins, and the last one before that when it was Ultima Online expansions. Which was like 6+ years ago.

 

[StriderShinryu]

They are a big (in some cases, the biggest) videogame company out there. They publish, on average, mostly pretty good games. They have made some decisions that clearly put profit above the consumer, but not necessarily more frequently than the average company in the industry.

Honestly, I think they're just a big company that has the fortunate/unfortunate distinction of being the one under the microscope most of the time. That's not to say they're a "good" company, but I don't really think it's even overly fair to single them out as "bad" either. Most of the practices they partake in that they get slammed for (following sales trends instead of innovative gameplay, easy adoption of DLC and micro transactions, poor treatment of employees, etc.) are basically industry wide standards. They're just a/the giant videogame publisher which means they have the biggest bullseye on their back. Of course, some of those standards could be bucked if a company the size and weight of EA actively worked to abolish them, but that doesn't make them any less commonplace.

 

[sXeth]

ultima 8 I agree with but what was incomplete about SI? I thought that was a great game with the slight issue that when you finally do get enough money there is nothing to spend it on because everyone is dead and it is a little buggy (like making it impossible most of the time to give the decorative platemail back to the queen)

Eck, Ultima Aiera is doing a site relaunch, so I don't have the handy link, but scavenged up design docs mention a ton of stuff that got cut out regarding the Banes taking over and some of the unused island. "Everyone is dead" was essentialy what they ended up doing because they got forced to finish faster, and couldn't do their full thing with the Avatar fighting against the Banes properly.

 

[kilenem]

Two of my Favorited racing games are EA games Burn Out and Need for Speed World. EA seems to have killed the Crietion team and didn't fully support the growth of Need For Speed World so that MMO isn't as good as it could be.

 

[PinkiePyro]

I do hate EA but I I admit EA is the same kind of evil as that big storm that hits right as you are going to travel ..
mostly they are just stupid and need to learn not to do the shit they keep pulling.,, *rolls eyes* if they would just cut the crap and stop with stuff like on-disk dlc, always on requrment, and pretty much overhaul their customer servace department.. then I would be fine with them..

 

[Artaneius]

I do hate EA but I I admit EA is the same kind of evil as that big storm that hits right as you are going to travel ..
mostly they are just stupid and need to learn not to do the shit they keep pulling.,, *rolls eyes* if they would just cut the crap and stop with stuff like on-disk dlc, always on requrment, and pretty much overhaul their customer servace department.. then I would be fine with them..

As long as people continue to buy their products, they will continue doing what they're doing. EA is in a position similar to how the railroads were during the western expansion in America. They can do whatever they want because they control most of what the masses want.

 

[Zealous]

No EA isn't evil. They're just capitalists like so many other companies. The only real difference between them and everyone else is that their public relations is absolute shit and the entire company is decidedly anti-consumer. That's about it really.

So no, I can't really fault them on being idiots. I just don't buy their products and that's that.


Plus assigning a objective concept like evil to a subjective issue is absolutely moronic to begin with. But whatever, nitpicking.

 

[Auron]

I think you may have just defined the reason for the hate compared to the other companies like Activision:

Activision tend to keep themselves to themselves, and ruin their own games. Where they have partnered and bought other studios it doesn't seem to have ended as quickly or as badly as EA's reapings.

EA ruin other peoples games, by buying over beloved companies in the middle of their franchises, and then excreting their corporate policies all over the new instalments they make. People who buy franchises owned by Activision know they are buying Activision. People who buy other franchises can suddenly find they have EA forced upon them if they want to continue their previously-EA-free franchise.
It happened with Command and Conquer fans, Bioware RPG fans, Simcity fans, Ultima fans, Battlefront fans, and I'm sure many, many more.

All of these found their beloved franchises ruined by EA, when EA had had nothing to do with creating them.

That fosters a very particular kind of hate, one which I suffer from, and I'm sure a lot of others in this forum.

Diablo, Warcraft and Starcraft. To be fair other than a few Marvel games and the Transformers games from High Moon I don't even know what the hell activision does these days(other than cod of course.) but I know you can pay 25$ for the newest mount in wow, Starcraft II was made to capitalize on the Esports industry and then they take ages to fix the game, wow churning out expansions whenever it can and Diablo III charging 40$ for one extra chapter and class in this day and age. I know we pay 10$ extra dollars for games because of them, I know Battlefield premium and map packs are inspired in cod practices, if they sell it EA can sell it too. I know Bobby Kotick has made outrageous claims and acted upon most of them(though there was an article that said it was all slander and misinterpreted jokes I'm not sure who to trust on that.)

Ultimately EA hasn't bought out a major studio since Bioware far as I remember, mainly because the mid-level studios which didn't die refuse to even be published by EA. It made several mistakes with beloved franchises in the past as you and I noted and it's founder was described as the greediest man ever but I'm not sure it deserves eternal hate for that... The deadlines they impose on developers still to this day(battlefield 4 should have waited a few months as the latest example.) is what they should stop doing, in fact I thought it was very funny that some investors are suing them over the state of BF4 when it's the shareholders who are said to push them into profitable releases instead of polishing the games. For every mild hit(they cancelled the new C&C on the grounds that it sucked... Would have liked to see a new one though.) there's a serious miss(premature releases and the vast amount of IP's they have gathering dust.)

Anyway, my point is, Activision did and still does a serious amount of harm to the industry with a diverse set of malpractices and evil inventions but it's not half as maligned as EA, in fact people made cod the best seller of the last 5 or 6 years.

Battlefront fans

Battlefront was always a second rate game, if it wasn't Star Wars no one would have played it(I played it a lot btw), How can it be ruined when it's probably not even in alpha?

 

[BloatedGuppy]

You can't take Star Wars and make World of Warcraft again and expect people not to notice

Pfft. They should be so lucky.

If anyone had succeeded in "making World of Warcraft again", as so many post WoW games have been accused, they would have shared some of its phenomenal success. TOR's sin wasn't being too much like World of Warcraft. It was aping WoW's structure without any real understanding of the elements that made WoW so successful.

 

[Lightknight]

You can't take Star Wars and make World of Warcraft again and expect people not to notice

Pfft. They should be so lucky.

If anyone had succeeded in "making World of Warcraft again", as so many post WoW games have been accused, they would have shared some of its phenomenal success. TOR's sin wasn't being too much like World of Warcraft. It was aping WoW's structure without any real understanding of the elements that made WoW so successful.

Right. It's like FPSs, if EA managed to make Battlefront mostly like COD/Battlefront like they're clearly trying to do, then there's no reason why I wouldn't play that instead since I'm clearly more invested in the SW universe than I am in the fictional "real world" setup of the other games.

But, if they just try to mimick them and don't do a good job of it, I'm not going to care that it exists.

 

[Hero in a half shell]

Diablo, Warcraft and Starcraft. To be fair other than a few Marvel games and the Transformers games from High Moon I don't even know what the hell activision does these days(other than cod of course.) but I know you can pay 25$ for the newest mount in wow, Starcraft II was made to capitalize on the Esports industry and then they take ages to fix the game, wow churning out expansions whenever it can and Diablo III charging 40$ for one extra chapter and class in this day and age. I know we pay 10$ extra dollars for games because of them, I know Battlefield premium and map packs are inspired in cod practices, if they sell it EA can sell it too. I know Bobby Kotick has made outrageous claims and acted upon most of them(though there was an article that said it was all slander and misinterpreted jokes I'm not sure who to trust on that.)

But Activision didn't buy out Blizzard for those franchises, it merged into Activision/Blizzard. The fans still consider Blizzard in charge of those franchises.

Blizzard is ruining WOW gets 2.8 million results in Google.
Activision is ruining WOW gets 36,000 results.
The details of the Blizzard/Activision merger means that each company is still seen as responsible for their own franchises, and their own business practices. This does not happen in EA takeovers.

Ultimately EA hasn't bought out a major studio since Bioware far as I remember, mainly because the mid-level studios which didn't die refuse to even be published by EA. It made several mistakes with beloved franchises in the past as you and I noted and it's founder was described as the greediest man ever but I'm not sure it deserves eternal hate for that... The deadlines they impose on developers still to this day(battlefield 4 should have waited a few months as the latest example.) is what they should stop doing, in fact I thought it was very funny that some investors are suing them over the state of BF4 when it's the shareholders who are said to push them into profitable releases instead of polishing the games. For every mild hit(they cancelled the new C&C on the grounds that it sucked... Would have liked to see a new one though.) there's a serious miss(premature releases and the vast amount of IP's they have gathering dust.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Electronic_Arts
EA have aquired several companies since Bioware/Pandemic. Mostly mobile developers (but not all) and the most prominent of those was PopCap, makers of Plants Verses Zombies.

Anyway, my point is, Activision did and still does a serious amount of harm to the industry with a diverse set of malpractices and evil inventions but it's not half as maligned as EA, in fact people made cod the best seller of the last 5 or 6 years.

Battlefront fans

Battlefront was always a second rate game, if it wasn't Star Wars no one would have played it(I played it a lot btw), How can it be ruined when it's probably not even in alpha?

Pandemic created the originals, I thought Pandemic was in charge of the third as well when EA shut them down, but it was given to another studio, so I was mistaken there.
They are still guilty of shutting down the developer of the original Battlefront 1 & 2, and I have a sinking feeling that DICE's version will be Battlefield with a Star Wars skin instead of the seamless ground/air/space battles touted in the alpha videos that the other developers had leaked. (They have chosen to release it as "Battlefront" instead of Battlefront 3, which bodes ill for hoping they'll stick as close to the Battlefront formula as possible.)

I'm not trying to defend Activision, or make out EA to be the devil, but I was just making the point that a lot of people have found their franchises bought over by EA and then seen them slowly (or quickly) decline in quality until they resemble nothing of the originals. That doesn't happen with the same frequency with other large publishers.

 

[Master_Fubar23]

SimCity, Battlefield 4, and business choices that are massively anti-consumer. Nuff said.

 

[EternallyBored]

I suppose it depends how you're defining evil. If you define it as knowingly commiting unethical or illegal actions simply for personal profit, then yes, they are evil. They have screwed over partners in the past, been fined for breaches in ethics and labor violations, tried to renege on contracts, as well as utilizing knowingly frivolous lawsuits that they would lose, but they have enough money to delay a verdict to the point that their opponent is driven to bankruptcy through legal fees (coincedently, this is a favored tactic used by banks to drive small business owners bankrupt).

If you define evil by drawing a line in the sand and saying that only certain especially harmful actions can count, then probably no, while an example of the typical big business, profit at any cost mentality, EA hasn't actually gone into the territory of directly killing other people through exploitation and willful negligence, and they haven't caused mass suffering on the scale of economic collapse and starvation.

So the answer depends entirely on where you draw the line on what's considered evil. Some people think that throwing the term around in any case except the most extreme, cheapens the concept of evil. Others believe that evil can be stratified into levels, so calling EA evil does not cheapen the much greater evils of larger companies and governments. In either case, EA's practices are still troubling at best, and grossly unethical at worst, so quibbling over the definition of evil and whether or not EA qualifies strikes me as a mostly useless argument that distracts us from the things EA should be rightly criticized for, whether we consider them evil or not

 

[LaSelaMelvins]

Ah, so EA is merely anti-consumer?
By the way "evil" was more or less meant to be metaphorical. Besides being what a sizable portion of gamers describe them, that is.
Nevertheless, this video remains the finest example of all things I could've read about EA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-LE0ycgkBQ

 

[Lightknight]

Ah, so EA is merely anti-consumer?
By the way "evil" was more or less meant to be metaphorical. Besides being what a sizable portion of gamers describe them, that is.
Nevertheless, this video remains the finest example of all things I could've read about EA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-LE0ycgkBQ

Well, some of the actions EA takes are anti-consumer, yes. But mostly they're just a bad business who doesn't understand their clients.

The video fails to comprehend that EA, love them or hate them (mostly hate), actually make games that people honestly want. Every year they manage to poop out at least two games I personally like. Then I have to review the game's specs and decide whether or not I want to give EA money that time around. I generally wait for 6 months or more and buy the game for a song.

But look at their list:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Electronic_Arts_games

It's HUGE and has decent games in there. So its easy to snub our noses at them and pretend like they have no value, but they actually run the full gamut of genuinely good games to shit to reviling destruction of childhood wonder back to good again. What a weird and inconsistent company. It'c convenient to say that people buy their games because they're dumb or gullible. But that's really just being ignorant in our own way too. Even if we don't like their games, we should be willing to acknowlege that a non-trivial portion of the gaming population does.