Neobr10: The problem is that you're blaming EA for factors that are inherent to the market itself.
Oh, the "invisible hand" of the market, how practical ! Whenever a company should be held responsible for its actions, pull the "the market did it ! not me !" card from your magic hat and tadaaa ! You're free to go !
Perhaps you forgot that EA is big enough to greatly influence how its sector work, and that other publishers aren't acting like them (and are still making tons of money). Perhaps you believe that, like you, they don't have the choice. Like it or not, EA can and did made choices.
You perfectly saw it when Activision-Blizzard took the lead with CoD and WoW, EA started seducing gamers and start being all nice with devs like DICE, and thousands of players believe EA "turned good" (ha !). And now these idiots are all butthurt at BF3 and ME3, "omg EA lied to me". EA perfectly has the power to decide what kind of interest and strategy they will pursue, and so far they haven't stopped abusing their power to bully their sector.
_92]Like it or not, studios are closed/opened every day. If a particular studio is not doing well sales-wise, no company will maintain it. From a gamer perspective this is terrible, but from a business perspective it isn't. EA is not the only publisher that closes internal studios.
So you're saying that not a SINGLE studio closure was decided for other reasons than poor sales ? Then how do you explain Popcap ? Bejeweled, Zuma, Peggle, Plants vs Zombies, not selling ?
You seem to see the business world as a fairy tale, with simple physical laws, without any human intervention - your universe could be run by robots (or just AIs). How would you explain Vivendi trying to sell its shares in Activision then ?
Neobr10: I understand your frustration. I got pissed when Activision shut Bizarre Creations down, when Disney shut Split Second's studio down, when Microsoft closed Ensemble, when Sony closed their London Studio, when Free Radical was shut down. The thing that i hate the most is how Microsoft destroyed Rare.
Yet, i don't think that these companies are evil or anything, and i still support them. You have to understand that decision within these companies are not made by gamers, but by businessmen. These decisions are based on market conditions, and i'm sure that these guys understand more than we do about it.
Because these decisions are made by businessmen, in a market, by people who are supposed to know their job, they are all morally and ethically right ?
=> A businessman can't be wrong (in terms of morality and ethics) ?
=> A market can't be unfairly biased and controlled by a group of bigger companies ?
=> People who know their job can't use that knowledge to abuse their dominant position ?
You're taking economical liberalism to such an extreme, businessmen and companies should be free of *any* constraint set up by society, simply because it is their sector of activity, they shouldn't be judged and criticized.
=> a businessmen doesn't -have to- be amoral to run a business. There is millions of companies throughout the world, they aren't all completely amoral entities.
=> "the market" isn't an excuse to abuses, simply because running a business is hard doesn't mean that everything is allowed, the very concept of a market is having everyone fighting with the same rules, if there is no rules, there is no market, just a business anarchy.
=> knowledge doesn't equal morality, and if they didn't knew their job, they wouldn't be so powerful, nor wouldn't be able to abuse their power so efficiently.
It is baffling that nowadays so many people believe that companies are living in a rules-free world, that not only we shouldn't interfere with them, but we shouldn't even criticize them, because they probably "know their stuff" better than we do.
