EA is often criticized for buying smaller development studios primarily for their intellectual property assets, and then making the developers produce run-of-the-mill games on these same franchises. For example, Origin-produced Ultima VIII: Pagan and Ultima IX: Ascension were developed quickly under EA's ownership, and these two are considered by many as not up to the standard of the rest of the series, being aimed at lowest common denominator audience. Productions from EA owned studios as of late have generally not been known for their originality.[citation needed]
EA is also criticized for shutting down its acquired studios after a poorly performing game. Many see EA's control and direction as being primarily responsible for the game's failure rather than the studio. Magic Carpet 2 was rushed to completion over the objections of designer Peter Molyneux and it shipped during the holiday season with several major bugs. Studios such as Origin, Westwood Studios, and Bullfrog had previously produced games attracting a significant fanbase, and when they were closed down many top designers and programmers refused to stay with EA and formed rival studios. EA has also received harsh fire from labour groups for their dismissals of large groups of employees during the closure of a studio (see below). Such was the case with the game GoldenEye: Rogue Agent.
EA is also notorious for the practice of rushing out products, setting extremely short deadlines and emphasizing good graphics to compensate for the lack of gameplay aspects originally intended by many developers, not implemented due to lack of time.
After releasing many semi-finished products, the lack of support is notable in many games, assured by the fact that EA declared openly that they would no longer support relatively new but still buggy titles, like Need for Speed: Most Wanted, Underground I and some of the latest Command and Conquer games.
Electronic Arts announced it would not support the Sega Dreamcast unless it sold 1 million units. When this happened within a record 90 days, EA went back on their word and declined to support the Dreamcast in favour of Sony's PlayStation 2.
EA has also been criticized for other aggressive business methods like the acquisition of 19.9 percent of shares of their competitor Ubisoft in what was called a "hostile act" by Ubisoft CEO, Yves Guillemot.[3]
[edit] Employment policy
Electronic Arts has from time to time been criticized for its employment policy of requiring employees to work extraordinarily long hours—up to 80 hours per week—as a general rule and not just at "crunch" times leading up to the scheduled releases of products. "The current mandatory hours are 9 a.m. to 10 p.m.—seven days a week—with the occasional Saturday evening off for good behaviour (at 6:30 p.m.)"[4]. The company has since settled a class action lawsuit brought by game artists to compensate for "unpaid overtime" EA management demanded of its employees[5]. The class was awarded $15.6 million. As a result, many of the lower-level artists are now working at an hourly rate. A similar suit brought by programmers was settled for $14.9 million. [6]
[edit] Exclusive licenses
Some think Electronic Arts' sports licenses are threatening the game market. After Sega's ESPN NFL 2K5 successfully grabbed market share away from EA's dominant Madden NFL series during the 2004 holiday season, EA responded by making several large sports licensing deals which include an exclusive agreement with the NFL, and in January 2005, a 15-year deal with ESPN. The ESPN deal gives EA exclusive first rights to all ESPN content for sports simulation games. On April 11, 2005, EA announced a similar, 6-year licensing deal with the Collegiate Licensing Company (CLC) for exclusive rights to college football content. Critics believe that the reduced competition is likely to result in fewer improvements for subsequent versions than would otherwise occur.
Electronic Arts was also subject to much criticism after releasing the title NASCAR SimRacing, an anticipated auto racing simulation. Upon its release, it was found to be extremely buggy, with numerous software issues requiring a patch. After substantial delay, a patch was released, but it did not resolve issues in multiplayer that essentially prevented competitive online racing. There is no indication that EA plans to release further fixes, as the last patch was released over 6 months ago. This was particularly aggravating to players because EA held the exclusive license to all NASCAR games, and the lack of competition gave EA little incentive to update the game, however some of the members in the sim community are beta testers for EA and painted their own cars and put them up for download as updates to the game to reflect the current Nascar Nextel Cup season.
Electronic Arts also has the license to the Lord of The Rings series and has thus been slow in responding to criticism of both of their RTS games in the series (Battle for Middle Earth I/II), including little to no multiplayer support, which proves to be bugged.
[edit] Online strategy
Many EA Sports games for the PC and PS2 are only supported by EA's servers for one year, forcing gamers to buy the next increment in the series (at full price) to continue playing online afterwards.
EA was criticized for refusing to publish for the highly-touted Xbox Live online service, which is run through Microsoft's own servers and which charges a yearly flat fee, regardless of the number of titles. EA would not be able to retain use of its own servers for Xbox games and thus could not charge a monthly fee for every game as they could on the PS2. Unlike the PC and PS2 versions, EA would not have been able to discontinue support for last year's title on Live, reducing potential sales of their current title. EA capitulated in 2004 and started publishing for Xbox Live, under the condition that Microsoft dropped their sports range.
Despite having finally released games for Xbox Live, for which there is no charge to play specific games, EA releases them all on the condition that Microsoft allow the games connect to the EA servers in order to play them online. EA online games for the Xbox generally suffer from more glitches and delays. Many users in Europe have complained about the performance of EA's servers, particularly on the game Burnout 3, questioning the logic of providing a central service only to decentralize servers for certain titles.
In August 2006, EA shut down the servers supporting many games they had released in 2005, effectively disabling those games' multiplayer support. This move was an attempt to force users to upgrade to the latest iterations of their games. [7]
The Battlefield 2 online demo was roundly condemned by the gaming community since EA instituted a 10–15 time play time limit (unheard of at the time) and shut down servers who ran mods on the demo version. EA in general has discouraged fan-made patches and mods, and they have shut down popular fan-made game modifications, resulting in criticism that they could transform the gaming industry into one that is hostile towards fan modifications.
EA later came under criticism by the Battlefield 2 community after the release of the add-on pack, Special Forces. It contains new unlockable weapons which can then be used in the original BF2 game. These weapons are only available to players who have played Special Forces, generally meaning that players have to buy the Special Forces add-on to access them. Some sections of the community viewed this as EA charging players to gain an advantage in Battlefield 2. It has also been criticized for its general failure to properly test and patch the game to a stable version, as well as making changes to gameplay when most gamers simply want stability and fixing of existing bugs and exploits.
EA was in hot water over the alleged use of tracking cookies and scanning surfing habits via Battlefield 2142. EA later released an explanatory note detailing exactly what was tracked, revealing that data was only collected ingame and was utilized in the targeting of ingame ads. IGA Worldwide CEO Justin Townsend was also interviewed by Gamasutra about the controversy [8].
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Originally Posted by yamangman
