so who hates EA?

[Danimal]

I honestly don't care.

 

[OCybrManO]

So there's never been a worthy game that has come from EA? Besides, they are a business, and businesses are there to make money. In that world, the dollar sign is the number one sign of greatness.

There are two main ways of attempting to get "the number one sign of greatness." You can either have a history of great games/support and build up a large, loyal fanbase like Blizzard, Valve, etc... or you can assimilate everything that is pop culture into your games, rehash the same formula of a game that turns out to be a good seller in tons of sequels and expansion packs, and get rid of the competition by any means possible. EA sees a developer making a game with potential and assimilates them if they aren't competition... but if they are, the Death Star starts to power up. Then, after assimilation, EA proceeds to rush them to pump the game out as fast as possible (even if it's a bit buggy or unpolished). If the game sells well and looks like a cash cow EA makes the developers release a half-assed expansion pack that should have come as a patch (if it's a PC game) and still sells for another $50 until popularity wanes... then they make a sequel and a new wave of expansions. Obviously there are going to be some great games that come out of that process. It's like buying lottery tickets. If you buy one and you get a winner that's ****ing awesome. If you buy a million and get a winner... you're EA.

There were around 7 expansion packs for The Sims, right? There is already an expansion pack for The Sims 2 less than 5 months after the first one released. There were 3 expansions to Battlefield 1942 before Battlefield 2 came along. How much support is there for any of the original games after an expansion pack or two comes out? None. If you want the game you should have gotten you have to buy the expansion packs. What kind of support have they given the modding community? None. For example, the BF1942 modding tools were supposed to be released with the first patch (if not with the game itself) and nothing came, they got pushed back to the second patch and nothing came, they got pushed back to the first expansion pack and nothing came... by that time the community had already broken the file formats, made converters/editors for 3D meshes, textures, sounds, maps, etc as well as gathering all of the modding info into huge tutorials with no help from EA or the developer, Dice.

... and that's not even going into their internal practices. EA is up there with Microsoft, Disney, and Wal-Mart in terms of companies that treat their customers and employees like shit while still making tons of money. It's going to stay that way. I can't do anything about it. No one here can do anything about it. It would take a worldwide boycott to have any siginificant effect on those companies... and that's never going to happen.

 

[VirusType2]

I think EA puts out some great games.

I have no gripe with them, except often they put out games with Poor AI though.

I love medal of honor, need for speed, and thier boxing series.


I know they can do better, but am generally impressed with thier games. They are paying alot of people and spending alot of money if the game is being debugged so sometimes there are bugs and they just release it anyway. This is how they got all the haters.

I was impressed by the things that they were doing back in the early 80's even.