I fucking despise Electronic Arts with every fiber of my being. I genuinely struggle to think of another publisher that has done as much damage to the gaming industry as EA has. The amount of talent they've wasted, the legendary studios they've shut down, the beloved franchises they've run into the ground, all while squeezing every last penny out of their customers, is genuinely fucking depressing.
These motherfuckers have bought some of the most talented studios in the industry, milked them for whatever they're worth, and then thrown them in the trash the moment they stopped being profitable enough. They took studios with actual passion, creativity, and talented people behind them and turned them into corporate zombies chasing trends, microtransactions, and quarterly profits. And when things inevitably went wrong, it was the developers who lost their jobs while the executives walked away just fine.
I swear to God, I genuinely hope EA goes bankrupt tomorrow. I want to see them lose everything they've spent decades building, not because I want the people working there to suffer, but because I'm so fucking tired of watching a company with that much money and influence repeatedly screw over the very industry that made it successful in the first place.
And the most depressing part? None of it fucking matters. FIFA will keep selling like crazy, people will keep throwing money at Ultimate Team, and EA will continue making billions regardless of how many studios they shut down or how many franchises they ruin. You could write a fucking essay about everything wrong with this company, and tomorrow millions of people would still happily hand them their money. It's honestly infuriating.
They’re more venture capitalist than they are a gaming corporation at this point. I mean, the majority of their company is owned by Saudi Arabia. People who are blaming BioWare for its downfall are unaware of how these types of practices are destroying the gaming industry. They’re naive if they think the decisions ruining their games are at the helm of the developers who go overworked and underpaid.
You can make art for the hell of it, and sink time and money doing it for the love of the art.
But if you want to make your money back, you have to make art people want to buy. That means figuring out what people want to buy and making art for those people. That's the "target".
And before you say "Just make good games", there are plenty of "good games" or even "good enough games" that don't sell enough. We like to think the artistic merit of the game is enough to sell the game, but that is not true at all.
Oh, BioWare deserves its fair share of blame, too. The staff who made the magic happen in the original DA/ME series are long gone. And even those games had notoriously terrible, crunch heavy development cycles before EA was involved with ownership.
After the controversial mess that was DA Veilguard, ME was the last intellectual property left standing. Unfortunately the new ME project has been in development literally since Andromeda dropped, over 9 years ago, and they've never had anything meaningful to show for it on N7 day. 9 straight years of disappointment, then going out with a whimper.
glad to see someone recognize who actually owns this stuff. Despite certain narratives, Saudi Arabia actually owns like all of american media: entertainment, sports, news, social media platforms like Twitter/X, etc. SA expects returns on their investments, and that leads to all of these cut throat practices and consolidation.
I think it’s fundamentally flawed to turn this into a “Saudi Arabia vs America” thing. It’s not. It’s a capitalism thing. Making it about nations is missing the point, the American billionaire will exploit you the same as the Saudi Arabian billionaire
They're private equity, not venture capital. They acquire assets to strip them for parts while milking whatever revenue they can in the short term before the brand is ruined.
Woah woah woah, while it's true these guys look only at numbers for a lot of things, many numbers tell a fairly compelling story.
In Bioware's case, they were always in danger and everyone saw it coming from miles away. Anthem and Dragon Age: the Veilguard were both very expensive failures that took forever to make, made nowhere near the money they needed to break even, and the reasons were never on EA, they were on Bioware. Now WHY that is, is anyone's guess, but you just CANNOT have a decade of two incredibly expensive failures in this industry, one of which, straight-up carried a powerful brand name. The Veilguard was catastrophic, because EA actually had very low expectations, and the game couldn't even come close to that either.
It's abundantly clear, these aren't the Mass Effect guys. In fact, given what we know of their failures, a new Mass Effect would've unlikely been some blockbuster GOTY contender in 2031 or anything. Those people are long gone.
People who complain about Bioware (like myself) absolutely know how ass EA and the things they do are. Don't try to change the narrative as if people are just letting EA off the hook.
EA is 100% owned by Saudi Arabia. After they bought it, they loaded EA with a ton of debt from the purchase. So they will be shutting down more and what ever they need to, to cover that debt.
Except EA acquired Bioware in 2007? The founders who lead all the good stuff left in 2012 and EA appointed a new head after a year of nobody. The creator of Mass Effect left in 2014. The writer of the first two ME games and Anthem left in 2018. The director of Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire, and Dragon Age Origins also left in 2018. I'm sure plenty of decisions came directly from Bioware leads, but EA appointing them since 2012 and hovering in the background with their idiot leaders probably influenced a lot.
what you guys fail to understand is that founders cash out and retire. most of those studio founders eventually reach the point where they want to do something else. they hang on, because they are asked to, they are gone the moment they are no longer contractually bound to stay and it's not just them, a lot of the original DNA moves on as well, what remains most of the time is just a shadow. there aren't any major incentives anymore, as those that remain are now corporate labour slaves and that's very different from working towards an exit that sets you up for life.
I don't understand the sports games. I'm a NHL fan. You see people complain about how bad the games are, but then they act like they are forced to buy it. You want to play online with your friends who all hate the new game? Keep playing the old one together, and let the dork who wants to buy the new one have no-one to play with. Like, just don't buy it. You're telling me 22 and 24 are better... Pop em in. Stop buying the new ones.
Someone is working on getting one of the older one's on PC, but I haven't seen anything for a while. I know that there was a HUGE leak of the PlayStation library. From what I understand, someone reverse engineered everything with AI. May be worth looking in to. I'm not a big fan of AI, but hey... If someone's gonna use it, they might as well use it to screw Sony 😂
I stopped buying them after 21. I haven't seen any significant improvements in gameplay. I'll buy the newer version when I have a reason to. The models this year were so unbelievably bad, they were a meme. No thanks, I'll play something else.
I have madden 24 or 25, but otherwise the free ones that came with psplus back in the day so like 2017-2019 nhl, mlb, fifa… all I need is franchise mode. never played ultimate team for more than a week or two, just never got the hype. from a business standpoint I get why tho. Just sucks.
It's because a lot of people who predominantly play sports games pretty much are only aware of/interested in their specific 1-2 sports and maybe a big hyped mainstream game or two every year.
Also some of them feel pressured to get the new games to keep playing with any online friend group they have that also plays and don't wanna be left behind.
AKA, casual gamers who make up a large majority of the gamers. Perhaps unfortunately, most of the people that roam around online forums like these are in the minority.
With few exceptions, the sports fans I know IRL spend more money in a year on sports than I will in 5 with all of my hobbies combined. Sure there are other expensive hobbies, but the average sports fan is spending way more on just watching sports than most other hobbies which are far less popular.
Most sports fans seem groomed to be ok with pitching insane amounts of money at anything to do with sports. EA just dipped into a genre of people willing to pitch money at them.
It's insane to me how the most expensive editions of sports games will be like $100 - $150, then a few months after release you can get it for $10. Unless sports games are the only games you play all year, I genuinely can't understand why anyone would buy them new.
I don't know what to say other than I'm one of those NHL fans. I just like hockey and get a certain sense of joy when i'm playing it because it 'sort of' resembles my favourite sport. Unfortunately, you also see all the wasted potential and it's a never ending cycle of enjoyment into dissapointment.
It's the best there is, and we complain because we care and hope for the future where it can be better.
Ill never forgive the fuck up that was Command and Conquer 4. Yeah let's take away the fuckin base building from a base building game and kill the franchise🤑
I think it probably still does well solely because there still are no real viable alternatives available. Sims players were talking a big game about leaving after the buyout was announced, I honestly have no idea if that ended up being true, though.
And Origin Systems (Wing Commander) and Popcap (bejeweled, PvZ)) and a dozen others. Getting bought by EA is a death sentence. The only question is how long you can last before the suits roll up and put your company in the dirt.
On the one hand, EA already owned Origin when they released UO (bought in 92, UO released in 97). On the other hand, Richard Garriott will be reclaiming the Ultima IP sometime next year because US copyright law allows the seller to reclaim IP after 35 years.
Worse, they took our beloved Origin Systems and destroyed it.
Origin was like Bioware before Bioware. There was a time when the Origin Systems logo was the mark of quality, just like once the Bioware logo was the mark of quality.
Very true. I love dumping on EA as much as anyone. But shockingly enough, they kept Bioware funded WAY longer than I thought they had any right to ask.
You can't push flop after flop for over a decade and somehow get another more hundreds of millions to fund the next likely flop.
I recall during the Anthem deep-dives that suggested the guys from EA had to encourage the devs to leave/implement flying into the game, so the only good thing about that game was a result of EA’s intervention lmao
Really? That's crazy. I thought it was Bioware's idea lol. It's a no brainer for that game tbh. They literally made Ironman the game. How do you not include flying?
Bioware is such a strange beast. They used to have incredible ideas. Their Bioware formula was peerless back in the day. But after DA Inquisition, they lost any connection to the original vision outside of the name.
Yeah, EA for sure is a shit company. But lets not act like none of these wasn't party Biowares fault.
The fact is the quality of the games have been shit for years and the people who actually made all those amazing games back then, for the most part already left that sinking ship years ago.
They could have changed leadership? Hell they could have rebuilt the whole studio, they own them.
You do realize you're admitting here that BioWare was incompetent, suggest that EA should treat them like toddlers and do their work for them?
EA greenlights projects, gives funding, checks their progress and manages deadlines, etc. Actual game design and implementation is the responsibility of the studio, not the publisher.
And rebuilding the studio is no different from closing it. If you do that, you're essentially closing the studio and using its name later, but those are two completely different studios.
Stop dick riding bioware, awful studio that are indeed directly responsible for their own demise due to insane management decisions (not EA's fault) and terrible games. They didn't release anything that wasn't flaming garbage for 15 years. Good riddance.
With any luck, the IPs for Dragon Age and Mass Effect, might get sold off to a good team and we get both back to the good days quality. That or we get some good spiritual successors for them. Not holding my breath, but....
EA contributed. My understanding is Dragon Age 2 was rushed out the door because of pressure from EA to get another game out, fast. So EA is partly to blame but people are underplaying how much BioWare shot itself in the foot.
No. That is the last time you can blame EA for a Bioware problem. After that they stepped back. Anthem was entirely Bioware's idea. Andromeda was entirely Bioware's failure. And Veilguard's stop start dev cycle was Bioware again....if anything EA was asleep at the wheel and let them putter around for years wasting millions and producing nothing.
Both Anthem and The Veilguard were very expensive, mega failures, nearly entirely on Bioware and not EA. In this industry, getting a decade of not only one, but two pricey AF failures, will pretty much kill you, especially since one of those (DA: The Veilguard) had a full blown lucrative IP behind it. The weird part was that EA actually had relatively low expectations for player engagement, and the Veilguard met like half of that. The studio was borderline suicidal.
iirc there were interviews and EA showed up after like 5 years of letting bioware do their thing for anthem to discover they hadnt even picked what the game should be.
As fun as it is to hate on EA, 'bioware magic' was just doing nothing and to many cooks in the kitchen until the publisher told them to get off their ass and and bioware forced 70+ hour work weeks of crunch to get a product out from anthem on.
Im pretty sure reason why we havent gotten much good since is because all the good creators and devs left for less extreme work cycles and the new folks couldnt work in such conditions.
It's been years snice it happened, but wasn't the CEO of bioware, or someone higher up bragging about how Anthem was two years in development and making great progress when the team hadn't even started on the damn thing?
They at least are still doing a few decent Star Wars games.
Jedi Fallen Order and Survivor are genuinely fantastic games (outside of performance issues at launch for survivor). And at least for now, we have a 3rd one in development. And while I’ve not played it, the new galactic racer has raving reviews.
But outside of those… urm… yeah. Battlefield and FIFA it is.
Edit: Galactic racer isn’t actually from EA. My bad! Must have mixed it up with that tie fighter game they made a few years ago.
Survivor’s performance issues piss me off because I played it day one on Series X and had zero problems and I just fucking love that game, it’s in my top five, so for people to have poor experiences and for that to dominate the conversation was a huge shame
The FIFA community doesnt actually interact much with the larger gaming community, that might be while they have that weird behavior, a colleague back in college even did those fancy bubble graphs for mapping game communities and the sports games fans live in a community bubble.
It might be possible those games are almost all they play or known within gaming context.
This is why the support and excitement for GTA VI is baffling to me. They were clearly union busting and retaliating and mistreating their developers. But no one seems to care. They just want the game. Same as FIFA and Madden fans I guess. I won't be buying it, but that makes no difference.
Microsoft firing all those people after they made the awesome Dark Ages dlc is mind blowing. How does a gaming company play that and think “Yeah these guys gotta go.”
In reality Microsoft have killed more studios than EA, even if they are still around in name, they make nothing and are just a list to make MS seem a gaming giant
BioWare committed suicide... they haven't done anything really good in more than a decade, they've been little more than a corpse since then and honestly, it is far more surprising that EA kept just shoveling money into that hellhole.
Well... until now... my guess is that someone at EA asked them about the next Mass Effect and if they have anything to show... and BW just couldn't give them anything.
As I said, my guess is that after the absolute Disaster that was Veilguard, someone from EA, in the past few months asked them if they actually had something on the next Mass Effect... and they just didn't have anything besides vague concepts and a bit of Art and that's at least partially the reason they got the Axe now.
you do understand that it was EA policies, extreme budget cuts, forced outsourcing and general censorship that led any recent projects down the drain, right? The majority of the original developers left because of the unrealistic way EA treats its IP's. Being forced to outsource parts of a game to foreign studios that have 0 experience, because EA decided it's better for budget, doesn't get you a great game.
And the thing is, EA has done this time and time again with studios that have real potential. Now it's BioWare, after literal decades of sabotage by their owner. Yeah, they didn't produce what they could have, should have, would have.. but EA is to blame for that more than whatever was left of BioWare to begin with, and I wouldn't say suicide.. I'd say it's been slowly poisoned until there was enough reason to kill it completely. So.. fuck EA.
I don't think there's convincing evidence to support the theory that EA is the primary reason that BioWare has been releasing awful games.
I think BioWare simply lost the employees who made those great games many years ago and the newer employees who replaced them weren't capable of making good games.
You know, guys, there do exist bad game designers, bad project managers, etc. It's not like the only reason bad games get made is bad CEOs lol.
No, it has been downhill when the Founders left... after that BioWare became entirely chaotic and inattentive at best... flip-floping around as if the entire Studio caught ADHD.
This is just typical "Studio Good, Corpo Bad" Bullshit that enabled the three conescutive Major Failures in the first place...
Yes, and the constant friction of BioWare trying to maintain it's own identity while EA was trying to make them conform has been reportedly a big reason for leaving in the first place.
Who do you think is in control? Do you think being forced to run games on an engine that wasn't suitable for the type of game was the director's idea of a fun time?
A studio that is owned by a company is under constant pressure to adhere to the rules of the company.
I agree, leadership didn't have enough backbone or even interest to turn these games around. And I agree, the team was a mess with good employees constantly leaving and it having no direction.
Hell, I'll even concede that BioWare wasn't "studio good" anymore, for a good while.
But that is CAUSED by that type of mismanagement. And EA is very well known for using the "you either agree or there is no funding" method.
The three flops are symptoms of a studio already mostly killed in the first place. And that makes this just a belated epitaph.
And that's just a good reminder of what this absolutely bad corpo has done a good while ago.
It is totally valid to look at a picture of a thing you once loved, and even though it died years ago, still dislike the thing that killed it.
Explain Jedi Fallen Order, or Jedi Survivor, or It Takes Two, or Split Fiction, or Apex Legends. Uh-oh, turns out it's not EA that's the problem. And EA tried to bail them out over and over again.
Explain Jedi Fallen Order, or Jedi Survivor, or It Takes Two, or Split Fiction, or Apex Legends. How come EA only destroyed the studio that made nothing but mediocre games in the last decade? It's a mystery, I guess.
That makes a lot of sense. I was thinking “damn, I’ve played and loved nearly all of these games (except Anthem) and I hardly even play video games anymore.”
"These motherfuckers have bought some of the most talented studios in the industry, milked them for whatever they're worth, and then thrown them in the trash the moment they stopped being profitable enough"
From what I've heard and seen, that doesn't seem to be the case for bioware. EA has been bankrolling their failures for over a decade at this point, I'm surprised they weren't shut down the moment Veilguard flopped, but a whole two years after.
On top of that, if ANY of the shit about Anthem's development is true, then Bioware is damn near wholly responsible for their own downfall. Emphasis on damn NEAR
Quick Google search will tell you that the entire production processed was made a complete nightmare because of corporate BS, live service BS, high ranking people in the company constantly getting taken off the project.
I mean, the live service shit is enough. They were designing a game to be an online multiplayer game, EA saw Star wars sales half way through development, and made them change course. It's literally EA's fault. No clue why you're simping for them.
Its already written, theres a video that show that until a certain point they had 15 stuidos bought and closed, some of them didnt last a year. Theres were other 8, but they re in they same boat as BioWare was.
That’s a long rant about how bad EA sucks. Funny how you completely absolved BioWare of any responsibility for their own downfall. The writing has been on the wall. You just didn’t want to see it.
I don't think the people who were still at Bioware were still capable of making the kind of game that made them popular, but I think a lot of the blame for why they are in that state does fall on EA. The studio was basically a world class RPG studio and EA kept making them work on live service projects or include live service elements in their games. People who were good at making the RPGs left and then the studio made products that were neither good RPGs or good live service money printers.
Nah, I was just pissed off at them lmao. Now that I've cooled down a bit, yeah, they kinda brought it on themselves, but still... three decades of a studio's history down the fucking drain because of decisions that were probably 60% driven by EA.
I don’t know who’s pulled the strings behind the baffling level of mismanagement, but Andromeda was a tipping point. The game was still enjoyable, but definitely a decline in quality. Then Anthem was a massive failure. Dragon Age was their last chance to right the ship, and they fumbled the opportunity spectacularly.
It’s sad from a nostalgia standpoint, but I doubt they were capable of giving us a decent Mass Effect sequel.
Microsoft had an absolute ton of high tier games too. But like EA and Sony and a ton of others, they've gone largely complacent in recent years. It's to the point that it feels like game industry is headed for an 80s style crash.
Yeah I mean EA at this point is basically a private equity firm that specializes in video game industry acquisitions. They inevitably enshittify everything they touch but make out like bandits
This one's not on EA. This one's on Bioware. In response to davg criticism, he called his player fanbase worthless losers that'd buy whatever slop he put out
EA got bought out. EAs done. It's being sold off for assets
Chuds pouring mountains of money into FPS and Sports yearly release slop ruined this industry, and EA was at the forefront of that. They turned games from passion projects and collaborative art, to numbers on a shareholders spreadsheet.
I haven't bought an EA game since they fucked over Westwood Studios, I hope they rot.
As a kid, I always associated EA with Future Cop: LAPD. A banger of a PS1 game, so they were synonymous with quality. As an adult? Ho boy, talk about a fall from grace.
They also introduced micro-transactions in premium non-F2P games (Dead Space 3), which then led to that becoming normalized, which is a huge part of why AAA sucks so bad right now.
I'm glad I'm not the only one with a violent, vehement hatred of EA. I grew up playing The Sims, and then Dragon Age and Mass Effect in high school. I was heavily involved in the fandoms for all three. A great deal of my fondest memories are associated with those IPs and with people I met in those fandom spaces. It really does feel like EA has shat on my childhood specifically, sometimes.
EA isn’t a gaming company. EA is apparently just a finance institution that happens to have revenue streams from Gaming acquisitions, imo nothing more. The race to the bottom is very much in line with the VC bleed-it-dry-and-kill-it approach they’ve taken to all their games.
Just curious, but who made the decisions in those studios to sell out to EA? They weren't publicly traded companies, those developers made the conscious decision to sell out to what amounts to the private equity version of video game publishing corporations. Spare me this BS about how the poor innocent boutique development firm was the victim of a hostile takeover by evil corporations. They saw their opportunity to make bank and took it.
While EA is terrible, I don't think that really applies here.
Bioware was given a fuck ton of chances by EA and based on Jason Schreiers article on Anthem it was actually mostly Bioware to blame for that disaster if not entirely.
EA was literally the reason the flight mechanic was added back in which was akways considered to be the best part about Anthem.
Mass Effect Andromeda and DA Valeguard have to my knowledge also mostly been developed without much interference from EA.
Not to defend EA, but I really don't like this gamer narritive that it's always only the publushers fault when there are a fuck ton if examples where unfortunatly the devs were at fault (specifically the leadership).
The thing is, what you’re describing as failures is someone else’s success. The dudes who needed to make money still made money. The people who suffered were just collateral to the needs of the business. Capitalism is all that matters.
Personally, I don't think you hate EA enough, fuck those fucks for doing this fucking shit. I loved the Mass Effect franchise even even rushed to buy the shitty new DA game to "help fund it". Egg on my face now... No more buying anything for Apex and Battlefield for me.
Idea: if a publisher buys a studio and that studio subsequently is closed down, any IPs of the studio (especially from before the transaction) become public domain. I refuse to recognize fucking Veilguard as the last Dragon Age and Andromeda as the last Mass Effect.
that’s one side of it. There’s the other that allowed Josef Fares to do his games. EA is a business, and like every other businesses , it makes good choices and bad choices. I think your energies would be better spent on something else rather than hating a gaming company.
Agreed. I love the old games, but I hate everything that have twisted their newest "Electronic Arts" into. EA will continue to milk this until people realize they can get better games, but most of the people still buying their games are just chasing a hype. Lots of their games are popular for the wrong reasons, and becuase people are willing to put up with it, they will continue to dismantle their own IP from the inside until people finally have enough. But how long will it take to get there, I wonder?
I'm not fan of EA but by all accounts, Bioware did this to themselves. When Andromeda was a technical mess, people were quick to suggest that EA had forced them to use the Frostbite engine only for it to be revealed that Bioware leadership chose that themselves.
When Anthem flopped, people suggested that maybe EA forced them to make a live service shooter but it came out that Bioware chose to do that, and in the midst of the game being in development hell, EA executives pushed for Bioware to keep and expand the jetpack flying, which is like the only good thing about the game.
Honestly as much as I despise them and as much as I hate that the devs have to struggle with this shit, this stuff usually leads to those devs joining or starting a better studio. Arc Raiders and embark wouldn't exist if embark didn't become a thing with all the actual talent that made the battlefield games good, Titanfall wouldn't exist without Zampella (rip) starting Respawn after leaving Activision and the CoD studios. Hopefully the most talented bioware devs go on to do great things somewhere else.
FIFA has gotten so bad, too. I remember playing some early 2010s version or so. Loved how simple it was and how you could just pick a club and go through the leagues etc.
Picked up 26 recently to just see if it could scratch that old itch. Man that was depressing. Much bling and systems and no substance. Gave up trying to learn that after an hour or so. Sad.
Homie, eat a snickers. Anyone with talent jumped ship from this company years ago. They've done nothing noteworthy in the past decade. This was a matter of time.
okay but BioWare genuinely suck as developers in present day and EA has nothing to do with that. They can't write games anymore. Publisher complaints are irrelevant if the RPG is just a bad RPG.
Reality is EA would go bankrupt if all these degenerates stopped buying the same fucking game every year since 25 years and drain all their paychecks into it to buy non-physical cards that will disappear not even a year later with 0 fucking return on investment.
This is just pathetic cope. If Bioware make good games, they sell the games and they stay open. They made complete shit, and they didn't sell. Too bad. Gaming companies aren't places where your ilk can go and stink shit up and be carried just 'because.' Grow up.
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u/Sufficient_Bad_4160 7h ago
I fucking despise Electronic Arts with every fiber of my being. I genuinely struggle to think of another publisher that has done as much damage to the gaming industry as EA has. The amount of talent they've wasted, the legendary studios they've shut down, the beloved franchises they've run into the ground, all while squeezing every last penny out of their customers, is genuinely fucking depressing.
These motherfuckers have bought some of the most talented studios in the industry, milked them for whatever they're worth, and then thrown them in the trash the moment they stopped being profitable enough. They took studios with actual passion, creativity, and talented people behind them and turned them into corporate zombies chasing trends, microtransactions, and quarterly profits. And when things inevitably went wrong, it was the developers who lost their jobs while the executives walked away just fine.
I swear to God, I genuinely hope EA goes bankrupt tomorrow. I want to see them lose everything they've spent decades building, not because I want the people working there to suffer, but because I'm so fucking tired of watching a company with that much money and influence repeatedly screw over the very industry that made it successful in the first place.
And the most depressing part? None of it fucking matters. FIFA will keep selling like crazy, people will keep throwing money at Ultimate Team, and EA will continue making billions regardless of how many studios they shut down or how many franchises they ruin. You could write a fucking essay about everything wrong with this company, and tomorrow millions of people would still happily hand them their money. It's honestly infuriating.