End of an era. Who do we vote as the worst company ever now?

Well at least as far as gaming companies go, Blizzard always seems willing to throw its hat in the ring.

In spite of all the hate, I like that Blizzard's games don't use super nasty DRMs (like Denuvo, which EA, Ubisoft and many others use), all their games work perfectly under Linux (Wine/Proton), and they still host live download links to a game that's nearly three decades old (Diablo 2). Like literally yesterday I set up a new Linux laptop and was about to install Project Diablo 2 under Steam, and was pleasantly surprised to see that the HTTP links to the original D2 and D2 LoD setups were still alive, and the Win 9x-era downloader+installer still works just fine. I mean, how cool is that. And I could even log into battle.net and retrieve my CD keys too. For a 26yr old game.

Yeah, Ubisoft... one of the most depressing game-related events for me was when they took over one of my all-time favorite franchises, the Heroes of Might and Magic series, when 3DO sadly went bankrupt.

Olden Era is really good, it's kind of a spiritual successor to HoMM3.

Thanks for the rec - I'll check it ou!

What I really want (I know I'll never get it) - is a sequel with the charming pixel art graphics of HOMM2 and the game mechanics of HOMM3.

EA being voted as the worst company has always been funny to me. The world would be a far better place if it was indeed the case.

The gaming community likes to be extremely dramatic.

It's actually extremely logical if we will step away for a minute from the maximalist black and white, all or nothing worldview. Of course there worse entities out there. This doesn't mean that it is bad/pointless/ineffective to pick a battle with a smaller evil. In fact, it is better to pick a smaller evil.

Can you boycott Palantir? Well, no. Not really. No regular citizen can (to any definition of getting a result). It's like 100% ineffective. But boycotting a much small, consumer facing shitcorp in a highly competitive market is in fact effective and can often work. The efficiency is somewhere between 1% to 99%, which in all scenarios objectively better than 0%.

Same with boycotting some Chinese brands for example. Sure, the defeatist argument goes that because most everything is made there we can't really boycott those wares. But who exactly set these "fair play" rules and do humans need to one-sidedly abide by them when facing corporate abuse? I can buy Chinese something and at the same time boycott Chinese something else and it is fine. I literally don't care if some megacorp would consider that "unfair" or "hypocrisy". And neither should any individual human be concerned about corporation's opinions, ever.

I would say in EA's case, boycotting them did have some level of effectiveness. They didn't stop being shitty altogether, but they did come out with a couple strong singleplayer experiences that doesn't overwhelmingly stink of overt monetization, and it seemed like they put at least some attempt into turning their reputation around (though they still put out plenty of monetization slop, particularly their sports games)

But they messed around for too long, and I don't foresee their reputation ever seriously recovering. Especially now that they have a 55B investment/purchase to make up for now, they'll probably be even more egregious.

I'm not sure they're even the worst games company. Ubisoft would give them a run for their money but that's a $30 DLC over a $70 base price I refused to pay for.

No, EA earn every criticism and this move to PE will do absolutely nothing to improve their business practices.

I guess it'll keep existing with the name EA? "Public investment fund" doesn't sound too fitting for a game company

Won't Saudi ownership of something bad make it even worse? The era goes on!

Grave danger of integer overflow (underflow?).

I disagree. They're not gonna give up the brand recognition to rename it. They specifically wanted "Electronic Arts". EA has Battlefield, FIFA, The Sims, and Madden. Those four alone are probably responsible for 90% of the company's revenue.

If anything, now you can say that EA is doubly the worst company, especially in gaming.

EA lost FIFA a few years ago. The games are now "FC". They still sell though.

They didn’t lose FIFA, they let go. FIFA lost EA

Shit. I had a feeling I was fucking up on one of those. The other three are still massive franchises, though.

Another big one is College Football, at least in the US. And in the latest edition they nerfed the offline single-player mode's XP progression. In return they added microtransactions to buy XP points. For offline single-player. Gachaification continues.

Palantir? Flock?

Still EA. Had been boycotting them since like 2012 or so and will continue to do it. (no pirating or f2p stuff inclusive)

What a waste of Saudi money.

It's not a financial investment. They're buying influence.

>They're buying influence.

Buying EA for influence? With the reputation EA has in gaming? They're a joke - they're not influencing anything. Its like buying a violin to fix a flat tire.

>They're a joke

They are known for making games that sell to a mass audience and monetizing them well.

It's like calling McDonald's a joke. It doesn't take away that they are a successful business affecting many people in the world.

I agree they're good at making games that sell to a mass audience - but I really think that a lot of franchises have wasted a ton of money partnering with EA, which makes poor quality games that are exactly the same as the one they printed out 12 months ago. I haven't heard anyone talking about an EA sports game since the PS1 era and they seem to have completely missed the e-sports era where DOTA and Fortnight made vast sums of money. Don't get me wrong, they've made a ton of money, but I think they could have made still far more in more competant hands.

Fabulously greedy FIFA seems to have realized this and is no longer partnering with them.

News to me about FIFA. SA has been trying to gain "influence" in sports overall, and their video game endeavors also seem focused on "e-sports" more than gaming as a whole. I frequently hear complaints about them in fighting game circles, which is a more niche segment of "e-sports". EA is a big step up even if it's not DOTA/LoL levels.

Yeah. Actually it looks to me like FIFA jumped the gun a bit. They stopped letting EA making their games in 2023, but then choaked and have only released two not-great looking games seemingly meant for low end systems like phones and the Nintendo Switch. I doubt either sold as well as the EA FIFA games.

I'll bet they lost a lot of money - I'm sure there's an interesting story about FIFA's efforts to get their own game development up and running. I guess they wanted EA to pay $300 million per year and EA said no, but I doubt FIFA made 50 million on the games they released.

It’s also worth noting that the EA studio that makes FIFA has been continuously doing so for over twenty years. It’s not being handed off between studios and rebuild operational expertise over and over.

If anything, FIFA was probably getting an incredible deal from EA given the cost of making AAA games today.

If you havent heard of people playing ea sports games since ps1 you're in a bubble.

Yes, and buying McDonald's to influence anything would be a joke too. In fact EA is the McD of gaming, thats a perfect metaphor.

If you want influence, there are waaay better value propositions.

actually not. EA is a household name. You can ask every single person with a steam/xbox/psn account if they know ea. i guarantee you, 95% of them heard of EA and id say 80% of those have played an EA game in their lifetime.

That being said, influencing happens by mere exposure. There was a time, when Europeans bought up the kit of a bad mexican football club, just because the jersey was hyped on fifa 14. so if someone is trying to influence them, it will happen.

If they sold games and were well monetized (not to be confused with heavily monetized), they wouldn't be in this situation in the first place.

The 'core gamer' bubble has always been bad for this.

Sports games sell like hotcakes and have people buy them every year religiously but you never hear about them, sims too. Their other titles were heavy hitters.

Their just a seperate audience; EA certainly has influence, just not with people that talk about games.

Cultural influence though?

Are you going to have MAGA Madden?

The Socialist League?

>>With the reputation EA has in gaming?

Do you think your average EA Sports FC or Battlefield player is even aware of that reputation? These games still sell tens of million of copies. Positive influence in Battlefield alone would be huge.

They make all the sports games. Have you noticed all the sports and Mr. Beast type slop that's like "Wow and here we are inn Dubai / Saudi Arabia whatever and it's beautiful and luxurious and we're driving in Lambos waooowww"

If product placement didn't work it wouldn't be an industry

Do you think there's a realistic future where the money paid for EA could possibly be recouped with product placement?

Buying only a 40% stake in Epic, allowed China to successfully breach Apple's store monopoly and establish a foothold on a previously restricted platform. Will the gable pay off in the future or not, is not exactly relevant. The point is that they can leverage pre-existing western companies for their expansion plans in various ways.

So we can expect Battlefield: Iran sometime soon?

Starting the propaganda for a ground invasion. I wonder if this one one of the crowd-sourced ideas submitted to the DoD?

What do you mean ‘starting the propagand’? It already was a propaganda vehicle, but it will not be the US behind it this time.

Didn't realize gameswashing was a thing like sportswashing, but here we are

This. See Bobby Kotik and the Epstein files.

Not a waste either, it doesn't cost them anything. The debt is on EA.

Because the Saudis leveraged this buyout via a massive loan from JP Morgan, EA's debt is now 10 times higher than it was when it was a publicly traded company: $2.2b to $22b.

Turns out the notion that they wouldn’t need humans to make games and they would use AI for most things was a pipe dream and firing staff to be profitable with the huge loan didn't work.

Now they are fucked.

Every company that spends money to buy up companies died and goes defunct because they keep failing to realize that they have to keep spending loads of money to make money and it doesn’t just roll in after acquiring IPs. Not even mobile slop or live service can save them anymore.

Bending Spoons seems to be doing fine

I meant in the videogame industry.

Fuck this corrupt system.

You want to buy a company? Bring your own fucking money. Why do we have to pay for this shit?

What? This is JP Morgan on the hook for it if the loan goes bad.

You'll have to pay for it anyway. Games will get more expensive, there'll be more micro-transactions, etc. The investors as well as JP Morgan want their money back.

I wouldn't be so quick to assume the capital structure of a company influences its product decisions. Lots of well-funded, publicly traded companies are also screwing their customers for the sake of short-term revenue.

Want better games? Find them. Support the smaller studios and indie devs that produce quality, or contribute to a FOSS one.

Realistically EA will never financially recover from this in its current form. Likely they will carve out 1-2 portions of it they can resell and the rest will die.

No the taxpayer is. We paid the subprime mortgage bill. We will pay the private equity leverage bill too.

First of all the banks paid back that loan with interest. Second of all this EA loan is like pennies compared to that. JPM can swallow it easily.

Too big to fail eh? Do you really think if it blows up, the public won’t get sucked in?

Does this mean we'll finally get a new Sim City?

You'll take Skylines 2 and you'll like it.

I do like it.

Me too actually. Its enormously better than any of the sim cities, especially the last one.

But my GPU...

Are you that eager to give your money to the Saudis and Kushner?

There’s a whole world of gaming out there.

Only if I can build a giant ass linear city in the middle of the fucking desert with a big ass maglev in the middle in Sim City 4000

SimCopter really should have priority IMO.

Don't @ me until they bring back Sid Meier's SimGolf

Bundled with a revived Streets of SimCity please and thank you

Between Saudi and right wing influence it seems one publisher will be trying to influence social commentary.

This is being bought by Affinity Partners, the same Kushner led group that’s trying to buy out FIFA?

Is the Trump family just going to own all of our entertainment and military companies?

> Is the Trump family just going to own all of our entertainment and military companies?

Are we the Bad Guys?

Not any more. Now we're the Worse Guys.

Uh, nobody is trying to buy out FIFA....

I’m sorry, just the World Cup. And looks like they backed off the plan after the pushback from the member organizations of FIFA got too hot.

I thought I'd care more, but all EA is releasing nowadays is normie slop anyway, so yeah.

Ah private equity, the king midas of shit.

Wow, so EA’s yearly loan interest alone will be more than their yearly profits.

If they aren't completely toast, they'll be a shell of what they are today, which is already a shell of what they once were.