More on EA

So I did some EA bashing yesterday in my Spore post. I should probably clarify my comments a bit more. See, if it had been an otherwise-innocent company who'd decided to try out Spore's DRM setup, I (and, I suspect, many others) would have been somewhat more forgiving. Mistakes happen.

It wasn't an innocent company, though. It was EA.

EA has been building their bad reputation with gamers for years. From "new" games that are essentially slightly updated versions of their predecessors( i.e. the Madden football series), to expansion packs forcing people to pay for content that was originally supposed to be released as part of the base game (the Sims), to ridiculously buggy (sometimes to the point of being game-breaking) releases and shoddy customer support (pick a game, any game), EA has pretty well demonstrated that they're in this for the money, and once they have your cash, they don't particularly care about you. Google "EA sucks" and you'll get over 20,000 results; remove the quotation marks and you get ten times that.

So if EA sucks so bad, why are they raking in so much cash? Multiple reasons, really. For one, they are incredibly good at marketing. EA knows how to crank up the hype machines and get people excited about a game. As long as you fork over the cash, they're happy...so the game doesn't live up to expectations, or provide all the content they advertised? Too bad, sucker, you already bought it.

Another reason is because of their sheer market dominance. When EA is cranking out such a high percentage of the games on the market, it's hard for anyone not specifically watching out for their logo to avoid them. With an even bigger market share than Nintendo, and games spread across computers and consoles, EA is everywhere. They've been snapping up smaller developers for years, too, which expands their dominance that much further.

Speaking of acquisitions...one of the reasons EA still maintains a weak hold on some gamers who otherwise despise them (myself included) is because of their most well-known acquisition: Maxis.

Maxis has been putting out spectacular games for over two decades now. Sure, they've had some bombs (SimGolf, anyone?), but as a whole their list of releases is pretty great. EA snapped Maxis up in '97 after a couple of Maxis' not-so-great releases left them hurting a bit. Unlike their other acquisitions, EA has let Maxis hang onto some of its own identity, probably because they know the Maxis devotees like myself are out there. Despite EA's sticky fingers plaguing Maxis games (the aforementioned Sims expansion packs, Spore DRM, so on and so forth), we Maxis fans keep buying...because under all of EA's crap, the company we love is still alive and kicking, and they're still giving us games we enjoy despite EA doing their best to screw us over. The Sims 2 didn't sell over a million copies in just over a week solely because of EA's hype machines (though those didn't hurt). Fans didn't keep forking out money for expansion after expansion because we like EA. It's a Maxis game, and we love Maxis, with their llama-based humor, their creativity, their general awesomeness.

So, in summary: EA sucks. Maxis, however, does not. As long as Maxis can keep fighting off the suck-creep from EA, Maxis fans will keep buying. Spore's DRM fiasco is not promising as far as that goes, but I'm not abandoning Maxis yet, and I doubt I'm the only one. If EA screws with the Sims 3, though...well, we'll see in a few months, I guess.


Wii Fit Progress
Current Weight: 146
Goal Weight: 125
Weight gained: 0.9 lb (Up a little more...not freaking, though. like I said the other day, I'm seeing some definite muscle tone that wasn't there before, and muscle does weigh more than fat, so. I think I'm going to start taking weekly measurments as well. Don't know that I'll post those, though. ;) )