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 don't. Especially since former Bioware senior leadership have posted Youtube videos explicitly saying they were the ones who pushed to make Dragon Age a live service, not EA.
Check out Mark Darrah's youtube channel where he talks about the mess that was DA 4's development. It gives some really good insights on just how little direction Bioware's senior leadership had with their decision making, and how surprisingly little influence EA had on it.
I know everyone wants to make EA out to be the villain of the story, because they absolutely are majority of the time. But they really had little hand in Bioware's bizarre downward trajectory.
I concur that, from all the information I can find online, BioWare seems to have been a mess for a long time, if not from the beginning, and that things probably just worked out for a while by luck. Apparently, they used to rely heavily on brutal crunch times, had terrible/aimless leadership, and a toxic studio culture. Tbf, they also made their biggest hits at a time when there simply wasn't as much competition. And while I absolutely love the original ME trilogy, it's (at least to me) great mainly for its vision rather than gameplay, which is something you get mainly due to having amazing writers and/or directors. Meaning it's far less tied to a whole studio than to a very few specific individuals - and if they choose to leave, the biggest strength is gone.
BW leadership just seemed bizarrely out of touch. I remember when DA2 came out and people were (rightfully) complaining about the direction of the series. Senior BW leaders, especially Mike Laidlaw, were extremely arrogant and condescending. Like, they could not believe we weren't buying the "awesome-button" spiel. Same thing with ME3's ending and Casey being convinced it was the most brilliant thing ever.
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u/Sufficient_Bad_4160 8h 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.