Posted on 04/03/2013 at 10:31 PM
| Filed Under Blogs
On EA: It isn't the things they do to their own games, although that's bad enough. I'd have been royally pissed about SimCity if I'd bought it. I have no reason to patronize EA personally. I don't like sports games, I'm not overly fond of Bioware, and everything else EA does is better done by someone else. So if EA were just hurting itself I wouldn't care. The problem is, they buy and kill one studio after another, and have destroyed a terrible amount of talent in the industry. Origin, Westwood, and Maxis come to mind, and I doubt Bioware will last another three years. The other problem is, EA's noxious practices spread like a superflu virus through the industry. EA was DRMing its games back in the 1980s long before Microsoft sought to do the same to its business software, if that tells you anything. If there's something you hate about video game industry practices, chances are it originated with EA. Sadly, that is not hyperbole. And for all of its cash-grabbing and DRMing, EA still posts net losses of hundreds of millions of dollars per year, sometimes per quarter. They really need to rethink their whole business.
Activision, I don't have any complaints about. I simply don't buy Blizzard games or Call of Duty. The best I can say about Activision, is at least they only shit on their own properties, as opposed to EA shitting all over the entire industry.
I'm hoping that dumping Yoichi Wada will turn things around at Square Enix, and I've heard SE has enlisted Sony to help with Final Fantasy XV. I, too, am sad that they haven't been as prolific as they were on PS1 and PS2, but I also don't think they deserve all the hate they get, either. In the meantime, Namco and Sega have done much to fill the RPG void, as has Bethesda with Fallout 3 and New Vegas, so I'm not really suffering either.