I do buy the occasional EA game, and am generally quite happy with them. However, my views on their quality and business strategies are quickly pissing me off, this last year especially. They're looking as bad as Microsoft when it comes to the quality of their products and how they screw customers for cash. EA is the microsoft of the gaming industry.
Rant mode: ON
I work at a store where our main focus is renting and selling games. I see examples of EA's cheapness constantly, especially lately.
Introduction to Instruction: Many of their games now have minimalist instruction manuals. The sports games are lucky to hit 10 pages including the front and back covers. All they include is the basic controls and a summary of how to start up a game. Everything else is left for you to figure out on your own. It's like they're supplying only the beginning of an instruction manual, when compared with most other game's instructions.
Customers Aren't Worth Colour: On top of that, most of their instruction manuals (if they can even be called that) are completely black and white. Count yourself lucky if you get instructions with even just the front cover in colour, because that's becoming a rarity for their games. Even the label art on their game discs is going black and white. Talk about penny pinching.
So Called "Expansions" and Extras: I'm sorry, but EA expansion packs are an absolute joke. It's at the point of them creating a game and hacking features from it just to make sure the core game can be released quickly. Then all of the other features will each earn their own expansion, and EA will charge almost the same price for a single expansion as for the original game itself. So even if you buy 2 expansions, you've ended up paying 3 times the price of a normal game, and still don't have anywhere near the whole game. Take The Sims 2, for example. I think there's about 8 or 9 (probably more already) additional expansions released for it so far (including the "Stuff Packs"). Some simply add a bunch of extra items to the game, while others add a few new features with a few additional objects. And if that's not enough, you can buy individual items like you'd buy a single chocolate bar, one at a time. That is a complete cop out. It can't take more than a couple hours at most to create an object (shape it, texture it, and make a bit of code for it). They're creating the game's core engine, selling it at the full price of a game, and then adding all the rest one piece at a time, charging for each as if its a whole new game. It's a lot like movie theatres and what they charge for popcorn. It costs them about 15 cents at most to make a large bag of popcorn, and they're charging customers $4 or more for it. It's an absolute rip off.
What's Beta Testing?: Some of their games (not all) are so full of bugs that you have to wonder if the game was tested at all before it was released. Or are they depending on customers to be their beta testers? The games are being released way too fast with the mindset that they can fix everything later, after it's made a bunch of money and customers start complaining. Whatever happened to making a product that simply works as its supposed to when you buy it? When did customers become the lead testers? And to top it all off, customers have to pay for this privledge, where as real beta testers are the ones that get paid to find the bugs.
Re-package The Old: Many EA games are being released twice these days. The original is released, and a number of months later, the game is re-released with a couple little modifications. There will be bug fixes, one extra course (if it's a racing game), a few extra objects, and other similar very minor additions. For example, there was the holiday edition of The Sims 2. Pretty much the exact same game, just a couple minor extras. They'll use fancy names and new cover art to make it look different or a lot better, when it really isn't. "Special Edition", "Remix", "Expansion" and other code names are used for these. One huge one was NHL 2007 for the Playstation 2. It's mostly just a rehash of the 2006 version, except with an updated team roster, a couple control changes, and that's about it. The game engine and graphics are pretty much identical to 2006. They just copied it all over, changed the team rosters, and slapped the 2007 title on it. They did a fair bit more work on the Xbox 360 version of 2007, at least.
Advertising In Games: This is nothing new by EA, even though they're talking about it now. Many of their games are full of little comercials. A sign along a race track. A banner on the ice rink's boards. Or a product mentioned or used by characters in a game (like a name brand computer, or game title, etc). This kind of thing is everywhere in their games. So if they're actually talking about "adding" this, I can't imagine how bad its going to be in their future releases.
EA is sucking customers wallets dry in every way they can. They'll do anything to cash in and boost their bottom line. I half expect EA to out source everything to a 3rd world country just to cut down on labor costs. That's how greedy they're getting.
Rand Mode: Off
