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The 'EA Image' Tarnished
Gamespot reports that Pacific Crest Securities analyst Evan Wilson has gone on record saying that EA is wrecking its good name, with questionable business decisions and dropping game quality. From the article: "'Reviews of all of EA's annualized titles, its primary source of profit, have declined over the past two years,' Wilson noted. 'Although market share has not declined dramatically to date, in years such as 2007, which promises to have tremendous competition, it seems likely if quality does not improve. EA's aggregate review has also declined significantly in the past two years.'" 1up has the word that, in support of this, EA is still very proud of their 'paying for cheat codes' policy with Need for Speed.
I weep for the early to mid 80's, where *EVERY* single title coming out of Electronic Arts was pure gold. M.U.L.E., Mail Order Monsters, Dr J vs Larry Bird, Racing Destruction Set, The Seven Cities of Gold, Archon - the list of quality, addictive games coming from them kept me and my Commie 64 busy for ages and ages.
No offense, but Red Alert was one of the prime introducers of the bane of RTS's, tank rushing. It's true that the C&C games up until Generals were fun, but by no means groundbreaking or original other than C&C95. If you want a truly original and good RTS, try Total Annihilation.
My friend is a big Superman fan and pre-ordered "Superman Returns" the video game direct from the EA store. This was in April, the game then got pushed back to a November release date. In the meantime he had already been charged for the game. The game was supposed to be released on November 20th. As of November 24th my friend still did not recieve his game.
The only way to contact someone at the EA store if their is a problem is by logging in and sending a support e-mail which they say someone will get back to you in 24 hours. Three days later my friend still heard nothing after sending a support email and asked if I could help him somehow. I tried to find a phone number for the EA store - no luck, checked their main website etc... still no numbers got the address for EA games and googled it which gave me the corporate HQ number and location in the U.S. Called long distance to California to try to get it sorted out and the secretary instantly put my friend into an automated computer response system that did not have any options for the problem he was experiencing it then took a survey from him and hung up on him.
We called back a second time and got the same secretary again who transferred us to some guy that just went by the name of "Mike" he would not give his ufll name badge number nothing... I asekd him how my buddy could just get a refund since he went out and bought the game at the store since no one had gotten back to him. The guy said "Their is no one you can contact at the EA store the only way to contact someone is through their webmail form" I asked for a supervisor he said "I don't have the name of one to give you" I asked well who do I contact if this is not resolved ? He had no answer. I asked for his information in case this wasn't taken care of he just gave me his first name and refused to give me any other information and just kept saying it will be corrected I have let a supervisor know.
The morale of this story I would NEVER BUY ANYTHING DIRECT FROM EA EVER.
- He paid ahead of time
- They have no customer service except for email
- They have a don't call us or contact us if you have a problem policy
- They have a VERY SHADY way of doing business with customers.
- You can't talk to anyone live if you have a problem. Unless you call corporate HQ in which case you might get a Janitor for all anyone knows named "MIKE".
Now that a business analyst looks at it, we see evidence that EA is rotten to the core, not just bruised on the surface. They're apparently doing everything wrong, game-wise, development-wise and business-wise. The only thing they seem to do correctly is take over, assimilate and ruin a game studio in just such a manner as to manipulate the market share and keep their piece of pie the same size.
I'll never forgive EA for how it has ruined numerous studios (Origin was my favorite), several (former) employees' lives and the games that we loved to play.
Something familiar about those words....Oh, yeah. That has been Blizzard's policy for a decade now. "It's done when it's done." Go figure that it only took EA 10 years to adopt the one practice they should have been doing from the beginning.
Too little, too late. I feel extremely sorry for all of the lives it would affect, but I seriously hope EA bites the big one, goes down the toilet and either gets bought by a REAL game company or is taken apart and sold for scrap.