Electronic Arts

As it says, discuss the flaws of the industry giant, EA, and how they influence the video game world in a negative manner.

EA has the tendency to want to acquire all good game franchises and their companies in order to make profit off the titles, while seeming to ignore the overall quality of the games, which leads to the wreck of great series as well as the decline in the quality of a developer overall.This is what has more currently happened to BioWare.

EA really irked me whenever it decided to buy out BioWare because BioWare was one of my favorite game companies, with such classics as Baldur's Gate (I and II), Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (my favorite video game of all time), and Mass Effect. It was both KOTOR and ME that suffered EA's wrath the greatest.

I'm going to focus my rant mainly on what happened to ME, and where the EA's greed took over. To make my point, I feel that it should be noted that DLC was common at the time and even ME 1 released some before BioWare's EA days, as soon as EA took over, they actually only released certain MAJOR plot points in paid for DLC only. Having to pay for DLC to understand the main plot of a video game is beyond ridiculous, and an insult to gamers everywhere. Not to mention the over merchandising of the game to the point where it became more of a brand then a game franchise. Also, the games were released so close to one another, that the third game even failed to come to a proper conclusion for a beautifully set up story (from the first one) and in depth universe. This is what became of the company that brought us stories like KOTOR, whenever it became a property of EA.

As for KOTOR, I feel the quality of SWTOR would also have been more rich with maybe less focusing on recreating a WoW mechanics feel, and making a innovative core-mechanics system as well as a deeper story if EA were not involved at all, but I will admit, this is purely speculation on my part.

All in all, my hatred of EA comes from the fact that they put money over quality games. Milking existing franchises over innovation. It ultimately comes down to EA being far to disconnected from the gamer, and worse of all, not seeming to care either as long as their pockets are lined at the end of the day.

I'd love to hear your opinions on EA as well, now that I've shared mine.