Law Firm Files Class Action Suit Against EA Over Battlefield 4

[Madman123456]

With so many horrorstories about the videogame work environments, team bondi being at the forefront i feel like i should congratulate people who lose their jobs there.
Working yourself to exhaustion and further with every release while being pressured to get things done faster would probably get you to loathe videogaming as a whole.
I imagine some creators not being able to really enjoy videogames because they think about how hard people worked to get this or that thing done.

Sometimes i feel like you could get closer to the dream of making interactive entertainment when you have any other job and tinker on videogames in your free time.

Some People who where at team bondi would have been better off if the went to McDonalds and then made video game mods in their free time. Work 8 hours at the big M, then screw around with games for 8 more hours and you would still have better hours.
Apparently People there got told that if they wouldn't work the insane hours they wont be working anywhere in the video gaming industry.

EA might not be quite as bad but BF4 certainly looks like a clusterfuck of time constraints made by people who had too little sleep and too much coffee.


I always wondered why famous modder Alex Velicky never got hired by Bethesda.
Perhaps they thought "the guy certainly makes nice story driven campaigns, but if you look at the time between his mods it seem quite clear that he can't make content with insane superhuman speeds...".

 

[tdylan]

Look at CoD, sliding into the gutter year after year. Marginal improvements, an aging engine, models, textures and even animations being reused across several games. CoD has to go away for a while, for it's own sake. I want CoD to go off the market for 2, maybe 3 years, and when it comes back I want it to be the best damn CoD I ever played.

The problem is, Activision will not allow there to be a lull in COD releases any more than EA would allow there to be a lull in Madden releases. You have the big money maker that COD has been, setting sales record after sales record each year. Imagine saying to the share holders "We're not releasing the money maker this year." They'd fire you and bring in some "yes man" that will. Now, with the less than record breaking sales of COD Ghost, they're not going to take it as a sign of franchise fatigue. They'll consider Ghost the anomaly, and keep right on until the franchise is dead (by industry standards/expectations/comparison to previous releases). Then someone will surmise that it's not the due to the franchise having been milked to death because "look how well the previous ones sold, it must be the fault of the dev team. Fire them and get another team in here." I'm sure the excuses for Ghosts' poor sales have been "new console generation. This was to be expected. Holiday season 2014 when Black Ops 3: Blacker Ops releases, you'll see. We'll be right back in there. Black Ops sold well. Black Ops 2 sold better than it. So Black Ops 3 has no choice but to sell better than Black Ops 2. That's just math."

captcha: CLOUD NINE

No, no it's not.

 

[Amir Kondori]

Really not sure how to take this. Does EA really deserve this? Are there details here that we don't know? A lot of games have been released by EA that were in such an unfinished state. Why is this one different? Perhaps because Battlefield is a massive revenue source for them.

EA 100% deserves the blame. They knew the whole time it was buggy, they danced around it and lied about it not just to their shareholders but to gamers and fans of the franchise as well.

 

[Techno Squidgy]

Look at CoD, sliding into the gutter year after year. Marginal improvements, an aging engine, models, textures and even animations being reused across several games. CoD has to go away for a while, for it's own sake. I want CoD to go off the market for 2, maybe 3 years, and when it comes back I want it to be the best damn CoD I ever played.

The problem is, Activision will not allow there to be a lull in COD releases any more than EA would allow there to be a lull in Madden releases. You have the big money maker that COD has been, setting sales record after sales record each year. Imagine saying to the share holders "We're not releasing the money maker this year." They'd fire you and bring in some "yes man" that will. Now, with the less than record breaking sales of COD Ghost, they're not going to take it as a sign of franchise fatigue. They'll consider Ghost the anomaly, and keep right on until the franchise is dead (by industry standards/expectations/comparison to previous releases). Then someone will surmise that it's not the due to the franchise having been milked to death because "look how well the previous ones sold, it must be the fault of the dev team. Fire them and get another team in here." I'm sure the excuses for Ghosts' poor sales have been "new console generation. This was to be expected. Holiday season 2014 when Black Ops 3: Blacker Ops releases, you'll see. We'll be right back in there. Black Ops sold well. Black Ops 2 sold better than it. So Black Ops 3 has no choice but to sell better than Black Ops 2. That's just math."

captcha: CLOUD NINE

No, no it's not.

and such is the problem with today's game industry. mo' money mo' problems after all.

It's really quite upsetting having to watch CoD lose more and more of what made it good with each release, I absolutely loved this series, but sadly Black Ops 2 shattered the last vestige of faith I had left for CoD. Something big needs to happen in the shooter scene. Something needs to put this whole Modern/Extremely-Near-Future Warfare trend to bed for a bit. I've had enough of "realism" for now, give me something with lasers, rockets, and speeds completely inappropriate for any human to be travelling at unaided.

Or fuck it, give me a game about a German conscript during the siege of Berlin. So what if you're destined to lose, let me play as that terrified young lad, clutching his Mauser, standing between the Fatherland and the wrath of the Soviet forces. Bonus points if you get to execute Hitler as well for his crimes against humanity and for provoking the ruskies.

 

[Sarge034]

WHAT!?!?!? EA knowingly released a broken game, EA's stock price plummeted because of it, and now the people who are getting paid less because EA stock is down have a problem with it. I guess they should have just stuck with half-assing their niche games and not their primary bread winner. OH WELL.

 

[Roxas1359]

WHAT!?!?!? EA knowingly released a broken game, EA's stock price plummeted because of it, and now the people who are getting paid less because EA stock is down have a problem with it. I guess they should have just stuck with half-assing their niche games and not their primary bread winner. OH WELL.

Thing though is that that's not really the case. The problem is that EA lied to stockholders and investors about the game, which in turn artificially inflated their stocks, which then EA offloaded to other people through the method of Pumping and Dumping which is illegal. This isn't just about EA's investors making less money, pump and dump is very serious, although not as much as insider trading from what it seems.

 

[Sarge034]

Thing though is that that's not really the case. The problem is that EA lied to stockholders and investors about the game, which in turn artificially inflated their stocks, which then EA offloaded to other people through the method of Pumping and Dumping which is illegal. This isn't just about EA's investors making less money, pump and dump is very serious, although not as much as insider trading from what it seems.

The investors would not have given two shits if this was not impacting their cash. So what I said was correct. If the stock price had not risen or had not fallen the investors would not have been the people to bring this litigation against EA. Make no mistake, I am well aware of the actual charges and the reasons behind them. However, I am also well aware of the rational of the investors in this situation.

 

[Mad World]

Good. The Battlefield 4 release was horrible. Very unprofessional and premature. They've only just recently patched the game to acceptable standards. Unless they compensate, they need to be hit with a lawsuit, I believe. I play the game a fair bit; its initial form was horrendous.

EA and Dice were both too focused on DLC and Premium perks.

 

[Do4600]

As fun as it is to watch EA twist in the wind, I am not too excited about this. This kind of thing where developers/publishers/everyone is all ultimately held hostage by their share holders is the reason why no one can take any chances anymore on video games. Everything must be as safe as possible for maximum sales.

See, this is why it's a mistake to take a publisher public, and this is exactly why EA deserves this lawsuit. It never works, once you have shareholders you are in a straight jacket. You have to produce regularly to make the shareholders happy, but that never makes consumers happy because that production schedule doesn't make good work, then once the consumers are unhappy and stop buying the shareholders are unhappy because the consumers aren't buying, even though the reason the consumers aren't buying is because of what the shareholders wanted. This is why EA has become a monster in the publishing business and why Valve is more less showered with praise. Shareholders are incompatible with the video game industry, the only reason they work in the film industry is because it only takes five months to produce a 100 million dollar movie, it takes many years to produce a video game of the same budget.

 

[Clive Howlitzer]

As fun as it is to watch EA twist in the wind, I am not too excited about this. This kind of thing where developers/publishers/everyone is all ultimately held hostage by their share holders is the reason why no one can take any chances anymore on video games. Everything must be as safe as possible for maximum sales.

See, this is why it's a mistake to take a publisher public, and this is exactly why EA deserves this lawsuit. It never works, once you have shareholders you are in a straight jacket. You have to produce regularly to make the shareholders happy, but that never makes consumers happy because that production schedule doesn't make good work, then once the consumers are unhappy and stop buying the shareholders are unhappy because the consumers aren't buying, even though the reason the consumers aren't buying is because of what the shareholders wanted. This is why EA has become a monster in the publishing business and why Valve is more less showered with praise. Shareholders are incompatible with the video game industry, the only reason they work in the film industry is because it only takes five months to produce a 100 million dollar movie, it takes many years to produce a video game of the same budget.

It is very true, actually. If you watch the timeline of various game companies, almost all of them go downhill once they become publically trading. In contract, most that are still private, release much better games.

 

[Atmos Duality]

"Unfairly inaccurate" is a slippery basis for accusation because "inaccuracy" in relation to forecasting is arbitrary.
I mean that quite literally; in statistics (necessary for probabilistic forecasting) the -tester- chooses what degree of error is acceptable. There is no "default".

I'm guessing that the investors would have to agree to some sort of convention for handling projections and what is acceptable forecast error as a basis for legal action, because as I said; it's purely arbitrary. Either that, or they would need proof that EA had two sets of conflicting projections and only showed one to the investors, but even that claim is questionable.

My ignorance of the specific legal matters notwithstanding...
Forecasts are guesses, educated guesses, but still guesses. The investors gambled their cash on what someone else GUESSED, knowing full well it was a guess, and it failed. Boo hoo, they lost. That's how the market works.

Now, EA hiding information about KNOWN, FACTUAL fuckups from investors...that shit is a completely valid reason to go to court.

If this lawsuit goes through, there won't be an EA left to bend gamers over the barrel.

That depends entirely on the severity of the damages. Enron fucked a LOT of people over and were caught cooking the books for a long, long time. This is pittance compared to that.