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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I mean, maybe you can. You can have enough disposable income to give yourself a bit of self-congratulatory, masturbatory dopamine by buying organic toast and telling yourself you’re saving the planet or something. I don’t care how you get off.
But if you’re taking political action you can either start an organized boycott (and then you better do more than just not buy things the Internet told you are evil) or you’re not taking political action with your money.
I keep trying to explain this to people. Boycotts aren’t grassroots, spontaneous consumer flows. They are consumer-side strikes. They need organization and enforcement. If you’re substituting the free market for democracy you end up with neither.
But that also means we’re not talking about “voting with your wallet”, then. You’re talking about free market purchases of entertainment as a commodity and then I don’t give a crap what you do and there is zero reason to base your purchases on any sort of moral high horse. Just buy what you want to play and let the market do capitalism at you.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
You can very much vote with both.
No you can’t.
I mean, maybe you can. You can have enough disposable income to give yourself a bit of self-congratulatory, masturbatory dopamine by buying organic toast and telling yourself you’re saving the planet or something. I don’t care how you get off.
But if you’re taking political action you can either start an organized boycott (and then you better do more than just not buy things the Internet told you are evil) or you’re not taking political action with your money.
I keep trying to explain this to people. Boycotts aren’t grassroots, spontaneous consumer flows. They are consumer-side strikes. They need organization and enforcement. If you’re substituting the free market for democracy you end up with neither.
Get over yourself lmao.
Games aren’t food and you don’t have to buy them.
Oh, absolutely.
But that also means we’re not talking about “voting with your wallet”, then. You’re talking about free market purchases of entertainment as a commodity and then I don’t give a crap what you do and there is zero reason to base your purchases on any sort of moral high horse. Just buy what you want to play and let the market do capitalism at you.