Klem: You and I perfectly know
EA Spouse (
wikipedia article) is just the tip of the iceberg
and how it didn't changed anything in the long term.
SimonG: Talk about double standards...
Hoffman's actions, in part, led to the filing of three class action lawsuits against Electronic Arts and some changes
throughout the industry at large, such as reclassification of entry-level artists as hourly employees, thus making them eligible for overtime under California law.
Oh, changing a tiny part of a law of 1 state suddenly turned EA into a law-abiding company not moving its offices around and forcing their employees to do unpaid undeclared overtime ? Were you living under a rock for the previous 5 years ?
EA certainly isn't a philanthropic organisation. But when it comes towards video game publishing they are amongst the better once. Currently, they are maybe the best, imo. (A quick look on GOG exemplifies this).
Here we go again, "it's a company, it has to make money, therefore any kind of morality, ethics or basic respect for individuals and other companies doesn't apply to them". Being a company is now a free-card to amorality ?
And excuse me, simply because one department in EA managed to get the C-level greenlight for publishing their oldest games on gog.com doesn't mean they suddenly stopped being what they are on the recent IPs/games side, you're not gonna see BF3 (or even BF2) on gog.com anytime soon, their DLC and DRM policies are the same, and their IP acquisition department is still one of the worst in the entire video game industry.
Ask the Popcap employees if they think they're the best publisher around. They made the best and one of the most selling casual games ever (bejeweled, peggle, plants vs zombies, etc), generated millions of dollars, and EA is still bleeding them to a skeleton crew, a handful of months after buying them.
EDIT: haha, they even closed the entire Dublin studio 2 weeks ago, even the skeletons got the boot.
And the whole "They killed Blizzard/Bullforg etc..." well, let's just say there are always two sides to a story. Especially with Origin it is clear that it was Lord British who had a much bigger hand in its demise than EA.
So simply because some of the companies their ripped apart were in financial difficulties, means their aggressive M&A behaviour shouldn't be criticized ? And of course, the financial trouble were all caused by the previous owner of the company...
EA walked by, noticed a sinking company and said "ok, we'll buy it", grabbed the IPs, fired everyone, how lucky they were ! And EA is so lucky it kept happening to them, smaller studios with high-value IPs kept dying around them, and they grabbed what was left... Business is really a matter of pure luck, that's impressive.
And as said earlier, Popcap are really a company wasting money and in financial trouble - so much that EA bought them for only ~1
billion of dollars in 2011.
But yeah, EA is like, good guys, dude... they're not like Activision, who are like, evil, dude...
