I avoided this article since I knew it was going to be bull shit, plus I didn't want to give IGN the ad revenue for what was clearly nerdbaiting, but God damn you IGN.
Firstly, when will people realise that publishers do not make games. Publishers fund, publicise and distribute games. They do not create them. The only times when a publisher has any input to the actual creation of a game is when they want to meddle with it's design in a way that can make them more money. See Dead Space 2 multiplayer. But the main thing which I feel need re-iterating (for IGN et al., not The Escapist) is that publishers do not deserve credit for the creation of a game! EA owns some great studios who make great games, because they have loads of money. EA knows this and exploits this.
And yeah, EA is a corporation. Big woop. We all know that. That's not what pisses people off. It's how they run their corporation. They do it by using underhanded tactics to squeeze as much money out of the consumer as possible. Online passes, day 1 DLC, over priced DLC, paying for servers etc. These things are not necessary to be successful. Obviously a corporation wants to be as successful as they possibly can, so they won't be content in only being moderately successful if they're trying to be the best, but you don't have to be unethical about it. Valve and Steam for example. Valve are extremely successful and they have done it in a way that is focused around pleasing the customer and not being a dick, and it works ridiculously well, even though Valve are the biggest trolls in the industry.
And the past is irrelevant. So what if the company started trying to makes games that make people cry? It's been a very long time since they gave a shit about that. Now they just want your money. That version of EA is long gone. I'm not going to give a free pass to all the shit they try to pull now because they started out with good intentions. And at the risk of breaking Godwin's law, there are plenty of examples I could give of people who started with good intentions but ended up being completely evil pricks. Just because they started out trying to do the right thing doesn't mean that they are somehow undeserving of scorn for their later actions.
Although I think I should point out something. This article will probably perpetuate the idea that publishers (especially EA) bribe gaming news sites (especially IGN) in to saying nice things about them and their games. This isn't true. There's no evidence for this other than the fact that IGN and others give inflated scores (or perceived inflated scores) to certain games. But what's actually happening isn't bribery, it's worse. They pretty much blackmail them. And this is no secret. There's plenty of cases of publishers bullying gaming sites in to being nice or else they will withdraw their support, thus losing them ad revenue. Take a look at the firing of Jeff Gerstmann for his Kane and Lynch review at GameSpot. The editors buckled under pressure from Square Enix because Jeff dared to call it like it is.