> Why bother making changes?

One that springs to mind is that everybody you burn on this one is potentially a lost customer of the next one.

That's only a concern when continuing your behavior results in a decrease of revenue. EA has been acting like this for a long time. If driving off these kinds of customers was going to create future pain for them, it would have by now.

I posit this is because EA doesn't really have a brand identity per se, but SimCity does.

Agreed. The only reason some people know that EA publishes the Madden games is that it's right in your face when you start ("EA Sports. It's in the game."). Other than that, I doubt many people would even make the connection.

Much of EA's target audience could care less about what they've done to the gaming industry. They don't give a crap about reviews or DRM or always-online gameplay. It's just how their game works.

The SimCity franchise, I'm inclined to believe, is a much smaller, geekier segment of the gaming market, and these broad strokes made from the executives at EA tend to ruffle our feathers considerably more.

In that case, they've been doing this same kind of stuff with their other brands for quite a while and either are ignoring the pain it generates or aren't feeling it.

Some companies are great at ignoring pain until it kills them. I guess we'll see.

Haven't they been been posting pretty shitty quarterly statements for a few years now? They have a lot of money in the bank, so to speak, I'm sure, but it will catch up with them eventually.

Absolutely. I've sworn off the Football Manager series after the debacle that was FM2013. They've abandoned the current edition of their game in a buggy and unfinished state, and now they won't be getting any more of money in the future.

I haven't knowingly bought anything Sony since their rootkit fiasco and subsequent PR mess. I'm sure there's probably some media content I've consumed that came through them - but hardware? Absolutely nothing since 2005.

I dont know anything about the guardians chart here but certainly the charts in shops like Game are not based on any data at all, they're advertising slots, if you pay for the number 1 slot, you get it.

I know this because i had some interaction with a company that checked to make sure retails stores were putting the games in the right shelves that the game companies had paid for.

Anyway, just as a note, this guardian article doesnt provide any data, so it could simply be a paid for placement.

The article cites its source: http://www.chart-track.co.uk/?i=1559&s=1111

I don't see any reason why we would doubt it. Sims is selling cause the real world doesn't care about internet outrage.

Or, many of the people who would see this in a store and be excited might even be aware of the problems until they bring the game home and it bites them in the rear.

Describing an almost complete inability to play the game as "Internet outrage" seems rather glib.

The ability to play is the problem causing the outrage, it is not the outrage itself. It doesn't matter how justified the outrage is if people keep buying it, which they are.

Don't see how glib it is to point out the truth: internet outrage isn't translating to poor sales.

> most PC games from big publishers actually install malware and rootkits onto your machine! That seems infinitely worse than always-online, but no-one cares about that either.

If you define "most gamers" as the people that bought the products you are talking about it is certainly easier to say that those people don't care about those things.