I'll play devil's advocate and say that Activision are just typical corporate jerkwads when you get down to it. You get the sense that they're difficult to work for, and I know a few first-hand stories of times they've hijacked the reigns from developers in the interest of business over creativity... but to be fair, most of the time they didn't "hijack" so much as make a reasonable deal. "We'll give you extra perks if you work on this game that we want you to make instead of that game that you want to make."
There's the whole Infinity Ward scandal, but we have no idea what the full details are on that, and it's largely an isolated incident in not only Activision history, but gaming history as a whole. What's more, to their credit, rather than liquidating the studio after half of it left, they valued the jobs of everyone who was still there enough to keep the studio alive. That has to be worth something.
There's canceled games, like Brutal Legend and Ghostbusters, but... have you played those? I'll be honest, Activision kinda' called it on those two. They would have cost more than they were worth to promote and publish. There's the death of Guitar Hero, too, if you want to get really critical, but then how strong of a concept was that for a game, anyway? Not enough to justify yearly sequels as much as a steady stream of DLC tracks. The business model, I think, just wasn't there for it, and Activision as well as the gaming world as a whole realized it a bit too late. Better that they shot that particular race horse instead of trying in futility to put more resources into revitalizing it. Give it a few years, then maybe bring it back.
There's Bobby Kotick's constant running his mouth off... which is usually taken out-of-context and usually amounts to about as much as any given Jack Thompson ramble. I mean, yeah, Call of Duty Elite, the writing's been on the wall for that one for a year or two, but then you can't blame them for trying a new business model, can you?
When you get down to it, they're just doing what they can to keep their resources focused and maintain a certain sense of quality. They're WAY conservative and uncomfortably forward about how much control they maintain over their properties and studios, but they're just doing what publishers do, and don't kid yourself thinking that they're the only ones that do this. Frankly I can think of worse places--like Capcom.
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EA, though, actively damages the image of the gaming industry with its terrible ads and acts like a cancer to the companies underneath it. They've killed many once great studios, including Origin Systems and Bullfrog Entertainment--two companies that helped define what gaming is today.
Let's put that into perspective. They killed Origin Systems. That's the company that brought us Wing Commander, System Shock, and the Ultima series. I'm not exaggerating when I say that this is like if Sega somehow bought Nintendo and managed to permanently kill Mario, Zelda, and Star Fox. The hell of it is that they're still doing it--not as quickly as they used to, but I'll bet you that their management hasn't done Visceral or Bioware many favors.
Then there's all the consumer rights stuff. The DRM, the online passes, and the online distribution system that nobody was asking for. Then there's the endless sports game sequels; good business sense, yes, but it's well acknowledged in the Madden community that the last decent one was somewhere around 2004-2006 and that the series has not only stagnated, but actually gotten progressively and steadily worse. Shit, I still don't know what the Escapist's reviewers were smoking when they gave Madden 2011 a glowing review last year. I've seen that game in action, it looks pitiful...
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EA is competitive, yes, but they're consummate under-achievers. They're the game industry equivalent of that one guy you knew in high school that did the bare minimum effort to get a B-, usually relying on gambling the grading curve, taking ill-advised shortcuts, or copying someone else's homework, and even then you never felt like he deserved that much credit. Activision is the snobby straight A student. You hate how stuck up they are, but then they consistently end up being right, and then you hate them even more because you don't like admitting it.
