"EA doesn’t know why they’re the 'bad guy': Well, here’s why"

[kane_magus]

This article is almost a year old, but I only just saw it now, so here it is, anyway. (Does it really matter if I post "old" [in Internet time, anyway] shit, whether or not I acknowledge it as "old"? And really, how "old" is "too old," in Internet reckoning?)

I don't give a shit about Battlefront or FIFA games or whatever, which seems to be all the article talks about, but apply the same points to The Sims or Dragon Age or Mass Effect and it's still relevant.

"...a company that's one of the largest and most influential in the industry."

That is something they mention in the article a couple of times, but it isn't one of the bullet points for why EA sucks. I would say the fact that EA is "one of the largest and most influential" is, itself, a bad thing, and that is because, when combined with all the other points, you have all the other big game publishers in the industry rushing to copycat EA's horseshit, which is just a cycle of shit that feeds on itself endlessly, because then EA can just say "well, everyone else is doing it, so why shouldn't we?" even though, 9 times out of 10, they were the first to implement the bullshit.

Also, the article doesn't mention all the formerly great game studios that EA killed (or are currently in the process of killing) as a reason for why they are bad guys.

And obviously, as should be expected, there are EA apologists/fanboys/rep management drones down in the comments under the article, because of course they are.

Comments

[owsf2000]

To be honest, I stopped blaming EA for all the game devs they've ruined with their touch after the first 2-3.

After that point, the devs know full well what's going to happen to them once they sell their sole for some cash. I can't even swallow the excuse of "Oh but EA promised we'd be in full control and they wouldn't try to change us!" excuse.

They know, as we all do, that EA said pretty much the exact same thing with every other group they bought. What they mean when they say it is "We won't change anything so long as you manage to pull off a game every year and haul in at least fuckloads more profit than the previous game each and every time! Otherwise, we start 'helping' you do that."

So yeah, at this point I don't blame EA for killing off dev groups. Just about everything else? Yeah, totally blame them.

[kane_magus]

You could replace "EA" with "some big company" (e.g. Microsoft, Activision, Epic, etc.) there, and it would still be true. Almost verbatim, even.

So, I guess, the problem isn't EA specifically, but "giant, soulless corporations" in general. In the end, as always, it just comes down to $$$, and to hell with anything else. If the devs didn't value money over their own creative integrity, they wouldn't keep selling out to these giant, soulless corporations, even knowing going in that the giant, soulless corporations are inevitably, inexorably going to destroy them (or force them out) and then destroy their creative legacies. (It's just that EA happens to usually be the first to do the shitty things. The pace setter. The original evil. The one every other giant, soulless corporation uses as a business model to emulate. At least in the game industry. Microsoft, for instance, was full of its own brand of rancid, diarrhetic shit for years, long before it ever started dipping its malignant anus into the waters of the video game industry.)

And yet, like you say, even though devs should be able to recognize this and ought to know by now what they'd be getting themselves into, and, thus, they'd hopefully not sell out to them, it still just keeps on happening. (See also: devs that sign exclusivity deals with the Epic Games Store, because it's basically the same damn thing.) Some devs will say, maybe even legitimately, "Well if we hadn't sold out to some big company, we would have had to shut down entirely, because of <insert whatever excuses here, which usually just boil down to 'we sucked ass at managing a business'>." And to that I say I'd pretty much rather they did just shut down forever and move on to other things, rather than let some big company come in and pervert the previously good memories everyone had of them, prior to them selling out. As for the ones that didn't "have to" sell out to a bigger company (Mojang, as one example)... well... I don't know what excuse they would have, except for the money.

I mean, after all, two and a half fucking billion dollars is a lot of it. Poor Notch, I say sarcastically, because he made that particular bed of his own choice. Maybe it's one of the rare cases of it being a good thing Minecraft is not longer his. But then, I read that article and see a sentence like "Microsoft has worked to transition the game into a live service with cross platform capabilities and a thriving, community-supported marketplace," and it all comes full circle again to how giant, soulless corporations ruin everything they touch. (Well, the "cross platform" bit maybe isn't so bad, I guess? But the rest of it, the "live service" and "marketplace" dogshit is dogshit).

To continue onward down this Minecraft tangent, I was at my sister's house a year or two ago, and I was watching my grand nephews and nieces playing Minecraft on X-bone. And... it wasn't Minecraft. At least not like how I used to play it. In this, when they started a "new game," there was already this huge, pre-created dungeon/castle thing, and they were playing the thing like it was a fucking split-screen, multiplayer, FPS death match map or some sort of thing. I.e. they were running around like chickens with their heads cut off, trying to find weapons and armor and such, just so they could fight each other. They didn't give the slightest shit about trying to build/create anything. I don't even know if they knew this was even an option for how to play the game. For them, that was what Minecraft was, apparently. They'd probably be bored senseless if they played what I used to think of as Minecraft, where you just start in a big, open, sandbox world and are left to your own devices to do whatever you want. It was kind of sad to watch. They may as well have been playing Halo or Star Wars Battlefront or some shit (which I've watched them play, as well, and it was essentially the same goddamned thing, just running around fighting each other).

[kane_magus]

Also, Notch later going "hurr hurr jurnalzm amirite?" based on articles naturally being written about his whiny, self-indulgent tweets was rather... Trump-ish, in nature. (Even if this was back in 2015, before the full rise of Trump-isms like that, which just goes to show that Lügenpresse didn't start [obviously] with Trump [though Trump was definitely already well into his "fake news" bullshit narrative by that point in time, true enough].)

But anyway, getting off topic here. Lately, everything eventually seems to somehow circle back to Trump on my blog. >_>;

[kane_magus]

Then again, Notch isn't entirely wrong about the inanity of the video game journalism industry, either, so... *shrug*