"Every publisher f**ks up now and then."
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1815d

Fully half of the sessions I’ve sat down to play It Takes Two (from the same studio) I’ve been straight up unable to play it, because the EA launcher has been too jank to actually launch games.

That’s gone now thank god, but I still haven’t finished It Takes Two solely because of EA bullshit.

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115d

My wife and I just started playing it, so far no issues.

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1915d

People like to hate EA because it gives them a sense of pride and accomplishment

@[email protected]
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1015d

This man woke up and chose violence.

@[email protected]
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3015d

5 years in the future: “Split Fiction 2’s Josef Fares says he ‘understands why people like to hate EA’ after development nightmare”

MudMan
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1415d

I mean, they made three games together over the past seven years. How long do you think he needs to catch up with your zero days expertise before he can reliably state this?

DebatableRaccoon
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1315d

When his studio gets shut down and the IPs he created join the many others in the void that is everything EA devours.

MudMan
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715d

His studio isn’t owned by EA. Hazelight is an indie studio working with EA as a publisher through their EA Originals label.

Turns out EA has been publishing indie games for ages, which is one of those kinda neat things they do that nobody ever gives them credit for.

The_Decryptor
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1015d

Valve said the same about EA when they used them to publish the Orange Box, seems they’re great as partners but not owners.

MudMan
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415d

Right. People forget that The Orange Box was an EA game, too. I believe EA people even coded parts of the console ports directly or something, I’d have to look it up.

And yeah, that tracks. EA may exist only to provide a charisma black hole to cosmically balance out Steam’s ability to get players to go along with complete garbage sometimes.

DebatableRaccoon
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415d

Good to know, I guess it’s just hard to see past the haze of evil incarnate sometimes.

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15d

Guess they weren’t around for EA self destructive decisions over the last decade.

FiveMacs
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815d

They must have been enveloped in their pride and accomplishments that they didn’t see what was happening.

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1
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15d

More like three decades. Origin used to be one of the most legendary game studios before it was a crappy launcher. They also killed Westwood, Bullfrog, and many others.

MudMan
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1815d

More interesting than the random EA clickbait is his actual point:

“The problem with the whole capitalist idea is that you need to make more and more and more and more money,” he says. “That doesn’t make sense, because at the end of the day, you will make stupid decisions. But I just hope, in the best of worlds, that you take less of these stupid decisions and focus on what you truly, truly want. And those are the games.”

@[email protected]
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2015d

I love HazeLights games, and they’re basically the only EA games I buy. I’m glad they have a good relationship but I don’t know how long it can last. EA is like Dracula, the dinner spread may be nice, but after dinner you have to look out.

MudMan
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215d

Man, you’re missing out. EA Originals published a bunch of stuff worth playing that people mostly ignored. If you like HazeLight stuff, Unraveled 2 was a cute 2D platformer take on coop puzzling. Zau is a decent metroidvania, although not the best of last year. Lost in Random was so underrated.

And the main internal studios make cool stuff, too. Squadrons is great if you like Tie Fighter, the Dead Space remake is up there with Silent Hill 2 and Resident Evil 2, the Jedi games are decent soulslikes… They aren’t particularly adventurous outside their sports and shooter franchises, but I feel in general they also don’t ship too much outright bad stuff, looking at it with some neutrality.

@[email protected]
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415d

Yeah, there’s absolutely no reason people hate EA. They are an insane force for good in this world and there’s reason to ever look past the shiny veneer. After all, everything shiny must be good. I mean, why vote with your wallet when you could just open the wallet and give money to whatever you like without any fore or afterthought. Money doesn’t give corporations any power, that’s just an illusion. Keep consuming and all will be fine.

Anti Commercial-AI license

MudMan
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-315d

I’ll say this: there is absolutely no reason to “hate” a videogame company.

Like, Amazon and Meta, maybe? But certainly not for the videogame parts.

But also, voting with your wallet is late capitalist brain rot. You don’t vote with your wallet, you vote with your votes. Voting with your wallet just means people with a bigger wallet get a bigger say and people who need things from companies breaking the rules appear to be supporting them when they don’t. It’s extremely ironic to be given a dressing down about the ills of consumption while 100% buying into US-style anarchocapitalist “money is speech” bullshit.

If something is genuinely pernicious, get it banned through political action.

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315d

I watched a lot of my favorite game creators get pushed out when EA bought their studios and fired them all. EA also pushed for and lobby for the legality of lootboxes and microtransactions in games, using predatory tactics to prey on vulnerable people. There’s a guy in the fricking camp of dragon age origins who links to the store to buy dlc. They routinely lay off developers just before earnings calls to boost numbers. When I bought The Sims 2, they changed the terms of sale three months after and stopped offering downloads and voided my license when they moved from EA Downloader, their response was for me to purchase the game again. They’ve been assured multiple times for violating labor laws. They violated anti trust laws in enforcing exclusivity of college basketball players likeness, though they were sued over that as well.

I have a lot of reasons not to support EA

MudMan
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215d

Aren’t most of those examples from like… the mid 2000s? We’re like two CEOs and a remarkable amount of arthritis away from like 90% of that.

I like the loot boxes piece because everybody throws it at EA, but when you point out that Valve re-released CounterStrike two years ago and they very explicitly kept the loot boxes in all you get is crickets. Not that I think loot boxes are a deal breaker, myself, but hey, you’d expect some consistency.

I do not believe they’ve been in trouble for violating labour laws, either, but I’m not their lawyer. I know they got a pretty bad reputation like in the 90s or early 00s about a specific studio, but my understanding is they’re actually pretty good about that these days. If you’ve heard otherwise I’m happy to be given new evidence.

In any case, I don’t need them to be spotless. Big corpos are gonna big corpo, they’re all the same. But much as I do agree that they’ve done shitty stuff (I disagree particularly strongly with their stances on piracy and IP and how they enact those as part of larger orgs) I also have no issues acknowledging when they do cool stuff, like their recent release of C&C code as open source, whatever it is they’re doing with Faris or that time they got banned from selling in Russia and other places for adding explicit trans support to The Sims. Again, corpos gonna corpo. Best you can do is pat them in the back to incentivize the less crappy stuff.

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415d

Cool dude. Super useful article. /s

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-1215d

That’s crazy that people think ea is the worst company ever when nestle exists.

It truly speaks to their level of entitlement gamers have. What’s worse, a company that literally kills babies or one that closes down a studio?

Jerkface (any/all)
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15d

deleted by creator

MudMan
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-215d

I mean, they made a poll. Every company was there. They chose EA as literally the worst. Multiple times.

Forget the specifics, I’m stating that the gaming community as a whole LOVES a dogpile. It loves having a nemesis they can dunk on based on one or two tropes they picked up along the way.

It’s not just EA, it cycles. Ubi is in the hotseat at the moment (for reasons I suspect most can’t even properly articulate, incidentally). Epic is up there, too, particularly around these parts, where the Valve worship runs strong. But it’s definitely a pattern, it’s definitely not particularly rational or mature, and it’s definitely disproportionate.

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415d

Epic is up there mainly because Tim Sweeney is a fuckhead. The Epic exclusives don’t help my opinion of them either. I suspect I wouldn’t like Gabe Newell’s politics if he shared them, but he’s far too clever to do that.

MudMan
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015d

He shared them a long while ago. I believe he said he was a libertarian at the time, and others have said the same thing about him. Who knows where he falls in the middle of the current postapocalypse, but he runs a major tech company and the few reports that leaked out from his bubble make it seem like he’s… you know, a techbro. A techbro with enough mental acuity to do long term planning, but a techbro after all. Could have told you from the fact that Steam is pretty much a gig economy app at the end of the day.

But also, I don’t need a politics purity test to buy shit. That can’t be how we operate society. There needs to be a better way than that handled at the public level, even if libertarians like Gabe don’t like it. That goes for Newell, Sweeny, Andrew Wilson and all the other tech CEOs. I don’t align with any of them, I just need a strong enough set of incentives for the government to keep them in check.

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6
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14d

When your target demographic hates you is a lot different than the slaves that source your palm oil hating you.

It’s not worse but the result is going to be a lot more whiners.

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615d

There is no gray, only black and white. EA can’t be a bad company because Nestlé is the worst. You’re either good or you’re bad. That’s how the world works 🤷

Anti Commercial-AI license

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215d

Zzzzzz. Yet another clickbait/ragebait “gaming” article. Can you guys please post actual content for once

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