Cool dude. Super useful article. /s
this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2025
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Fully half of the sessions I've sat down to play It Takes Two (from the same studio) I've been straight up unable to play it, because the EA launcher has been too jank to actually launch games.
That's gone now thank god, but I still haven't finished It Takes Two solely because of EA bullshit.
My wife and I just started playing it, so far no issues.
People like to hate EA because it gives them a sense of pride and accomplishment
Zzzzzz. Yet another clickbait/ragebait "gaming" article. Can you guys please post actual content for once
More interesting than the random EA clickbait is his actual point:
"The problem with the whole capitalist idea is that you need to make more and more and more and more money," he says. "That doesn't make sense, because at the end of the day, you will make stupid decisions. But I just hope, in the best of worlds, that you take less of these stupid decisions and focus on what you truly, truly want. And those are the games."
5 years in the future: "Split Fiction 2's Josef Fares says he 'understands why people like to hate EA' after development nightmare"
I mean, they made three games together over the past seven years. How long do you think he needs to catch up with your zero days expertise before he can reliably state this?
When his studio gets shut down and the IPs he created join the many others in the void that is everything EA devours.
His studio isn't owned by EA. Hazelight is an indie studio working with EA as a publisher through their EA Originals label.
Turns out EA has been publishing indie games for ages, which is one of those kinda neat things they do that nobody ever gives them credit for.
Good to know, I guess it's just hard to see past the haze of evil incarnate sometimes.
Valve said the same about EA when they used them to publish the Orange Box, seems they're great as partners but not owners.
Right. People forget that The Orange Box was an EA game, too. I believe EA people even coded parts of the console ports directly or something, I'd have to look it up.
And yeah, that tracks. EA may exist only to provide a charisma black hole to cosmically balance out Steam's ability to get players to go along with complete garbage sometimes.
Guess they weren’t around for EA self destructive decisions over the last decade.
More like three decades. Origin used to be one of the most legendary game studios before it was a crappy launcher. They also killed Westwood, Bullfrog, and many others.
They must have been enveloped in their pride and accomplishments that they didn't see what was happening.
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.
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 don’t vote with your wallet, you vote with your votes
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.
This man woke up and chose violence.