Seems to be the opposite of other things that have been said in The Jimquisition before.
My opinion is somewhere between these extremes. Whining without anything behind it, is easy to ignore. It leads to the dismissive "well if you don't like it, don't play it" response which is absolutly insane because by the time you have a game that you don't like the guy saying that already got their money and isn't in any position where they are forced to provide a refund.
I think you need to whine about a product, make it clear your not going to buy something and WHY, and then go through with it, as opposed to QQing before a release and then purchusing the game anyway. When it comes to franchises, or the ongoing work of a specific company, you can pretty much jump on this in the middle of a series. For example, I bought "Old Republic Online", "Dragon Age 2", and "Mass Effect 3" all of which were trash for slightly differant reasons, involving elements that basically ruined the entire product for me, and a decent number of people. I've complained about it at great length for substantial periods of time, but I've done more than that in saying that I won't continue to support these franchises, or the work of Bioware, if they continue down this path, and I've stuck with it. I didn't buy any of the DLC for "Dragon Age 2" or "Mass Effect 3" despite having bought plenty of it for other games in the franchise. It hasn't gone unnoticed that for all of the comments about "Dragon Age 2" being a success, their last and apparently most major DLC pack was cancelled, which leads me to believe that despite brave faces they wound up not getting the mileage that they intended. With Mass Effect 3, their free "extension" of the ending is irrelevent to me, polishing up a turd still make something a turd, I'm not going to support the game by buying ANY of their DLC, and have actively been encouraging people to NOT buy things like the upcoming "Leviathan" pack. What's more I'm willing to carry this anger on to other products, basically I'm quite frank in saying that as things are going now I am not going to buy any more Bioware products, or games from this franchise, as long as they continue down this path and keep releasing turds. To be honest with their next games I'll probably only decide to buy them once the games have been out for a while, and once I know what is what with them, including whether they have an appropriate ending.
Whining in of itself does nothing, but whining backed by action, well that DOES do something, and I think the differance here is that your seeing action to go with the QQing which EA has started to notice. It's not an organized boycott, but it is costing EA money.
I'll also say that IMO a developer being hurt isn't a big deal in most cases. There will always be more developers. If the product isn't good, or is tied to business practices that ruin my enjoyment of it (such as having to slog through DRM) the developer deserves the flak for it. What's more the devs are just as greedy as the publishers, computers and office space aren't that expensive in comparison to game budgets, the rising development costs go to human resources (ie to pay the devs to make games). Companies like Bioware don't sell out to EA because they naively feel it's "the only way to get involved in the industry", heck to get EA's attention you usually have to be fairly successful... they sell out to EA because EA will give them bigger budgets, which amounts to more money into the developer's pockets. Companies like Bioware who go over to something like EA are selling out in a very real sense, just like an indie band selling out to a big label.
One thing you might want to pay attention to on this latter point is how much money some of these guys get paid. Despite pretensions of poverty and being "normal" most people involved in game development are quite well off by normal standards, but the ones you have to look at are the names involved at the top of game development studios. The paydays someone like an Itigaki (he fought over like 20 million dollars he was supposed to be paid at one point), or a Peter Molyneux, or the equivilent pull down are insane, we're talking movie-star type money coming out of that game development budget just to pay them before anything else. The thing is that companies like EA and Activision can afford to pay these guys more money than they could take out of a more humble publisher or self publishing arrangement.
People tend to forget about things like the "Infinity Ward Scandal" or if they remember it they remember the bit with Bobby Kotick using security to raid the studio. People increasingly forget about these truely huge bonuses that the guys in the studio were promised... money most would consider "too good to be true", but it says a lot that nobody there even blinked an eye when they were promised that kind of cash for delivering the product, even if there was a raid that basically cost them the bonus. It says a lot about the mentality and finances involved, that 'bonus' was doubtlessly part of the budget allotted to make the game (companies like Activision generally don't dip into their own profits, and things like bonuses are planned out).
The bottom line is that a developer that gets involved with a publisher can't say "hey, this intrusive DRM isn't our fault", or use other scapegoats to point fingers at the publisher and claim innocence, they are equally responsible. In the end the entire reason why this happens is they decided they were willing to see those things done in exchange for more money.
I'll also say that few people keep track of such things specifically, but you'll notice the heads of failed studios tend to be-bop around places and work with other companies afterwards. These guys generally have quite a golden parachute which is part of the problem as well. Whether a game succeeds or fails doesn't matter so much when you've got a few million dollars sticking out of your back pocket just for having your guys work on the project. I think a lot of the problem comes down to the simple fact that devs start dialing it in and ceasing to care (at least on the top) once they have a juicy contrat, because they know they're set, and anything they do from that point on is just gravy. If Bioware collapses the guys at the top of the studio probably aren't going to exactly have to go sit in the unemployment line, or live out of their cars or whatever, heck most of them will probably never have to work another day again at this point unless they really want to. I don't know what they are getting, but looking at other examples it's probably a LOT which is why they decided to sell out to EA.
