Bhaalspawn said:
EA don't develop games. They publish them. They own a lot of good studios, but despite the fact some of them are called "EA something-or-other" they don't develop any games in-house, like Valve or Nintendo may do. So they don't count.
OT: This is actually kind of hard. There are a lot of famously good studios out there, but do we really know everything about them? Also, although I don't disagree that plenty of the studios mentioned here are great I mostly don't have an affinity for their games, or I'm not familiar with them at least.
When I think of studios I like the first that comes to mind is Turn10. They have a genuine passion for what they do and it comes through a lot in their games. They listen to and keep in contact with their fanbase a lot, and darn it, Dan Greenawalt just seems like a really nice guy. I think Microsoft stifles them slightly though. They run on an incredibly tight release schedule and I think as a result of that their games are starting to get kind of overly-iterative.
Bethesda are another of my favourites. Again, they're clearly doing what they're doing because they love it. They don't want to make a game that ticks all the boxes and appeals to so many people it ends up appealing to nobody. They just want to make the game exactly how they want it to be, and to be as good as it can be. Each time they make a new game they want it to be new. They won't keep making sequel after sequel on the same game engine until it becomes ancient and outdated, they start over each time because they want it to be a completely new game and a completely new vision. Todd Howard is also a pretty groovy dude.
And although I haven't really gotten on with their games so far I think I have to mention CD Projekt if I'm talking about studios that do things the way they want. CD Projekt even arguably do it to more of an extreme than Bethesda. Even so much as to more or less throw away many chances to bring in profit which they are entitled to. They create free expansions and DRM free games which are incredibly uncompromising in their mechanics. They have an extremely precise vision that they want to achieve and give to people, profits be damned! There's no way anyone can't respect a studio with that kind of attitude. They're like the studio from a gamer's wet dream.
But am I saying those things just because I like the games? I guess that's not true with CD Projekt, but it's still a valid point. And do we really know these studios? Are they really these awesome places full of cool people, or do they just have a really great PR departments? How much do we really know about what goes on behind the scenes? I can't help but wonder about these things.