EA has been infamous for years for various things, not limited to: price gouging, microtransactions taking over games, buying studios to shut them down, rereleasing the same game with a new name and a new high price point – the list goes on.
Out of the loop on Atari. What did they do (besides go out of business – I assume you mean new Atari)?
I just learned what had become of two franchises I loved, Rollercoaster tycoon and Simcity. It seems to me that they have been leeching off classic and successful IPs, filling them with microtransactions and making cheap idle games for profit.
Yes. EA has definitely done that a long time. Hasbro now owns the rights to Roller Coaster Tycoon (since they acquired what was left of Atari).
To answer the question of the post, I’d say EA, since their transgressions count an order of magnitude higher than anything Atari/Hasbro could even dream of, based on the sheer number of games/properties they own.
Hasbro
Who, as the makers of the original lootbox game (Magic), have managed to turn it into both ultra-shiny cardboard for collectors (Secret Lairs, Collector Boosters) and a pretty-reasonable F2P game that people actually can and do play for free (Arena).
And yet they keep fucking up with Dungeons & Dragons. Go figure.
I think it has to be EA because Atari as I think of it was just a company that launched the success of home gaming but mismanaged themselves into bankruptcy, putting a pretty big dent in the north American video game industry in the process, but a dent that Nintendo very easily fixed with the NES only a few years later. The subsequent uses of the Atari name and IP by successive owners doesn’t really do anything but make me sad - I can’t really attribute anything that Atari does these days to the company that did all the good (and bad) stuff in the 80s. More like Bernie from Weekend at Bernie’s, being trotted out by companies hoping to capitalize on long-dead goodwill.
EA, on the other hand is the same company that started back in the 80s; they have an unbroken bloodline from the scrappy company making good quality computer games that hit the jackpot with their sports titles to the behemoth they are today with all the shitty practices we all know and hate. They are the company that lived long enough to see themselves become the villain.
Atari is a dead horse, Electronic Arts is the guy that goes around kicking them.
You know, EA doesn’t hold a candle to Atari shittiness in it’s hayday. Atari nearly single handedly destroyed the video game industry as we know it with their greed in the 80s; EA currently is ruining games but it’s a team effort with all the other short sighted companies out there (e.g. Blizzard, Square Enix, a slew of mobile companies, etc). Atari is nothing now, but only because they’re just a reanimated corpse of a company.
I got my complaints about SE but are they really in the same category as EA or Blizzard? I haven’t played XIV since 2.5 but my understanding is it’s still doing well and I’ve heard good things about XVI, although I can’t play until pc release so I’m avoiding all media about it.
I knew I’d get push back, haha. XIV is fine. Honestly I just wanted to include a Japanese company and their whole thing with NFTs was pretty bad, plus pretty heavy handed on shifting IPs to mobile for easy gacha monitozation. What’s the worst Japanese offender we can think of?
Ok yeah fair, I forgot about the whole NFT thing. They are a greedy ass company that’s for sure; Kingdom Hearts had been rerererereleased how many times now?
Nintendo does some pretty brain dead things for a Japanese gaming company.
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EA by a long shot.
EA… they killed SimCity they Killed Spore.
EA by a mile. However, there’s also Blizzard… Blizzard takes the fucking cake.
It’s Activision. Blizzard was fine before Activision.
EA is still much, much worse.
Funny enough, Activision was started because a bunch of people left Atari because Atari was shitty.
Oh, and they chose the name Activision because it would appear earlier in the phonebook than Atari.
Which Atari? The company got cracked in half after Warner bought them.
One half went to Jack Tramiel, then the grave, then a hard drive manufacturer, then Hasbro, then the grave again, then Infogrames, then the grave for a third time, then some kind of middle-eastern finance-bro vaporware hell that eventually spat out a funky PC nobody bought. Apparently they’re re-releasing the 7800 inside a 2600 case. Straight-up forty-year-old technology that still uses 4 KB cartridges. Honestly it sounds great. Not like they own most of the classic franchises, after Infogrames started hocking them in desperation.
The other half went to Midway and made most of the Atari arcade games you’ve heard of. Okay: Midway was bought by Bally, Bally Midway was bought by Williams, Warner ejected their games division as an independent company, Williams bought that, Williams ejected their games division as an independent company, and the part that was still OG “Atari Games” ceased operations around the turn of the millennium. Midway proper closed a decade later and was shortly purchased by Warner… again. But unlike the dead-skin-mask situation with the other half of Atari, Warner just took all their shit and left. That’s why they publish Mortal Kombat now.
EA meanwhile acquired Origin and squeezed them to death, acquired Bullfrog and squeezed them to death, acquired Maxis and squeezed them to death, acquired Westwood and squeezed them to death, acquired Dreamworks Interactive and sent them to the Medal Of Honor mines, accidentally acquired the leftovers of Psygnosis and left it to wither, acquired Criterion and stole RenderWare out from under an entire console generation, acquired DICE and sent them to the Battlefield mines, acquired PopCap and squeezed them to death, acquired their Tiger Woods contractee after a decade of great work and squeezed them to death for absolute shovelware, and… actually did an okay job with Respawn after Titanfall 2 didn’t sell well. And they’ve been kinda decent with Bioware. But other than that they’re the goddamn devil.
