EA Is Worse Than You Thought

this video is sponsored by north VPN Gaming is massive every day millions boot up their pcs consoles even phones and go online it's an industry that's tripled and just under a couple of decades and is now actually expected to become the top entertainment industry by the end of the year stocks are up cashes in and the future looks bright but bubbling just under the surface of this enormous growth is something sinister unspeakable actions horrors only the most depraved could fathom $7 digital fridges an internet requirement for a game this single player and is my game supposed to look like that that man's head is spinning around that's a gun pointing the wrong way and is that an advert in a game I paid 60 quid for why is my screen slowly diced gamers 5 game modes the last one had 9 out how physics were on lockers through a loop I the same game I saw it the graphics are actually worse than the last game and the list goes on rushed buggy and overly monetized games aren't anomalies either in fact if anything the last few years have actually seen more companies jump on board the process goes a bit like this you start by licensing a game this can be a standalone release or a completely new franchise but preferably it's a sequel in an already well-known franchise with the pre-established fanbase once you've worked out the details it's time to share your grand vision to the development team and then give them an impossible timeframe to make it once you're around a year or two into development it's time for the big reveal make sure to push the pre-order bonuses and limited editions at this point you can sit back and relax the game doesn't have to actually be what was shown at e3 in fact it doesn't even have to function on launch day or ever but if you're feeling generous you can finish the game later on down the line if you've paid your cards extra well your game is digital only and your customer service team rejects every refund request that comes their way throw in some loot boxes and cosmetics package some extra maps for the same price as the original game and you're done now some people aren't very happy about this an intern point to who they deem is the tip of the spear of these tactics that's Electronic Arts EA has been seen as the sort of pioneer of these practices for over a decade now constantly pushing the envelope as to what they can monetize and gaining such a reputation from it that it's very logo on the front cover of the game it's now seen as in the media red flag articles and posts calling them out o'clock various sub reddits countless development teams have been purchased milked and then shut down by them and they've been voted most hated company in America twice in a row the situation isn't good but believe it or not there was a time when he a wasn't universally despised EA became what it is today gradually and it all started in the mid 90s it's the early 80s good evening arcade gaming is big the biggest it's ever been and the PC market is beginning to grow as well in 1982 eggs Apple employee William Hawkins decides he wants a piece and establishes a game publishing company called amazing software then later changes the name to Electronic Arts the founding philosophy of the company is simple treat software like art and the developers like artists in the early years EA staked that even going as far as crediting the game designers and programmers on the front covers of their games they make a nice return on investment over the next few years funding talented developers who produce games like wasteland the game that would be the precursor to fallout however some developers eventually start failing to meet deadlines that and the end products begin to stray from what was agreed on so EA then begins experimenting with in-house development EA sport is established in 1991 and they begin buying up exclusive licenses to various sports leagues they slap some famous people on the front cover and start pumping out yearly releases with very few changes between them a few months later Hawkins steps down as CEO and instead sets his eyes on console development he goes on to create 3do specifications for the most powerful console in gaming history 3do closes operations 12 years later Hawkins also blows a significant portion of his money on private jets and tax issues anyway another man takes the mantle and he has a new philosophy it's now the mid 90s and the a is still pumping our annual sports games but they've also started buying our promising game developers a lot of them from 1992 to 1998 they purchased Westwood Studios the minds behind the command & Conquer series Maxis studios the people behind the Sims and bullfrog and origin two other talented developers at the time most of these studios are shut down by 2005 EA also signed a deal with the NFL for exclusive rights to player and team names essentially killing off all Co and competition this is when they start to get a bit of a reputation but this would be but a small taste of things to come but before we get onto that do you like privacy because every second you spend online yours is being taken your internet service provider sees everything you do and then sells on to advertisers also whenever you access public Wi-Fi there's a chance your data could be stolen by hackers if it is passwords credit cards and all those compromising photos are now on someone else's device there are two options continue being watched and risk being extorted by hackers or Nord VPN Nord VPN is essentially a first-class ticket to privacy they give you a map you click on a country and you're gone complete internet freedom on up to six of your devices at once and at the moment Northy PN is just three dollars 49 a month that's a month free to get the deal just hit the link in the description or use the code big boss at checkout it's now 2007 and EA has a new CEO appointed the company also looks to be making somewhat of a turnaround and branding and produces multiple promising IPs including Mass Effect in dead space these weren't just being churned out year after year either they also by both Bioware and pandemic pandemic being the developer behind Star Wars Battlefront they were shut down two years later it's now also a decade into EA's annual release of FIFA and it's around this time that somebody has an extraordinary idea a system where players create their very own team people would acquire players for their team by opening randomized packs using the credits they earned in-game ultimate team first appeared in the spin-off to fee for in 2007 but would later make its way into fee for 9 but this time there was a twist you could pay for packs with your mum's credit card the idea was revolutionary packs begin to appear in games like Mass Effect and battlefield and eventually spread to other publishers games the pay2win loop box was born so it's 2013 and ei have a little bit of a problem not only are they now hated by almost everyone but they're bringing in billions of dollars a year and still managing to lose money something has to change the CEO was immediately exiled the man he would replace him is Andrew Wilson former FIFA producer and also that man who greenlit FIFA Ultimate Team a few years ago also the CEO that replaced his Hawkins in 1991 is made executive chairman by this point it's clear which direction the company is headed and it works wonders for them this is a graph of EA's profits before and after Wilson becomes CEO EA also acquires the exclusive 10-year right to make Star Wars games and dice get to work on rebooting the Star Wars Battlefront series the EA had killed off a few years prior trailers drop and it's official a new Star Wars game is coming November the 17th 2015 November finally comes around and commercially the game does really well but when it comes to the actual game there are issues the game was called Star Wars Battlefront so people expected an experience similar to the first two games this was not that for starters there wasn't a campaign space battles were gone and there was just way less content than the last one and that was a game that came out in 2005 on top of that there was a dlc pass that was almost as much as the game itself okay so the game is not amazing but it didn't matter Bioware was coming back and their next masterpiece Mass Effect Andromeda was just around the corner it's finally 2017 and Bioware the Masters of storytelling back a new Mass Effect game 40 million dollars spent five years in the making it was going to be incredible and when we create something we put it out it is like you know putting your own child out there right that feeling still exists [Music] [Music] the game was terrible or the game's script was tight my face is tired the animations just weren't quite there they later passed it to make her face less tired there were also quite a few bugs the faces were a bit tough voice acting wasn't great to whom and your goddamn father terrible AI and the main character looked like she injected half a pound of heroin before every cutscene the facial animations were so bad that Bioware spent four months patching them the final product still left a lot to be desired besides the blinding technical issues the story in writing wasn't great and the only thing holding the game up was it's alright gameplay it didn't take long for Bioware to jump ship alright Andromeda is a write-off but it's okay EA have another shot with Star Wars Battlefront 2 coming out at the end of the year battlefront 2 was going to be the definitive Star Wars game EA had promised that they'd learnt their lesson from the first game and we're going above and beyond the call of duty to deliver with this one classes were back a campaign space battles three generations and best of all there was no season pass was this finally the classic battlefront experience launch day finally arrives and millions of players log in and start playing ea executives are gathered round clutching their chairs and sweating profusely but then something extraordinary happens people like the game had they done it delivered on their promises made a game that people thoroughly enjoyed without major issues the executives breathe a sigh of relief but just as Andrew goes to take a beer from the mini-fridge something happens articles appear message boards light up my god it's ready it turned out for after playing a few games people started to realize something they couldn't play as Darth Vader or Luke Skywalker together they were locked behind a 120,000 credit pay wolf that sounded like a lot of credits so someone on reddit began the equations a match takes around 11 minutes you earn around 275 credits per match that's 25 credits per minute that's about 2,400 minutes per unlock and my god it worked out that a total of 80 hours of gameplay was necessary to unlock the - or you could just you know they weren't the only things that were borderline lock behind a paywall either the entire progression system was to EA had essentially hum fisted the pack system of FIFA into a star wars battlefront game now at this point a few other shooters had also developed loot box systems there was just one difference they were for cosmetics this meant the game was paid to win people went crazy it wasn't long before EAS PR team were deployed on reddit but this only stoked the fires further by this point even mainstream media outlets for reporting it it was over EA had lost they announced a revamping of the progression system and God to work we're not done yet though it turns out that it wasn't just gamers in the media that enraged but governments around the globe - discussion started politicians held meetings and eventually the verdict was in guilty EA had enabled child gambling on their online Star Wars video game the UK undergoes talks about Luke box regulation American senators proposed a bill that would regulate loo boxes Belgium outright bans them EA would later come out and claim that loot boxes for fun and just like opening a kinder egg okay so Battlefront - also not too great but it was alright dice had another shot with battlefield 5 coming out late next year battlefield 1 was very well received so people were excited to see what dice had in store a couple of years later that was until the trailer dropped the game seemed to take place in World War 2 but something in the trailer caught people's eye there was a woman a woman with a massive claw arm also lots of face paint and a katana people were furious countless reddit threads tweets and comments questioning these design decisions appear instantly and the a have to respond again but this time they weren't gonna sit back and take it EA chief design officer Patrick Sutherland steps out and calls the fans behind the backlash uneducated he also tells them that if it's such a big problem just don't buy the game battlefield 5 sales were down by more than half Southerland would levy a later that year aside from that the game had many missing features at launch it was also not much of a step forward from battlefield 1 okay we have one more shot at this anthem a game Bioware has been working on for seven years and this time it's Bioware's a team calling the shots it's a whole new franchise handcrafted from the ground up this is the one fellas before we get into anthems reception I think it's important we talked a little bit about the games development in 2012 EA gave Bioware the go-ahead to create a new IP they then gave them seven years to produce a finished product Bioware spends a lot of that time on pre-production a lot of that time like five and a half years pre-production basically consists of massive back and forth sin meetings that ultimately resolve nothing and get the team nowhere time starts to pass and eventually they realize they only have 16 months to actually develop the game the game was released in February 2019 so that means that development must have started around July 2017 wait a minute that's after they revealed the game so all of this yeah they didn't actually have a game at this point we were finding out what the game was going to be at the same time as the developers so 16 months to develop a triple-a game that's a heavy time crunch and on top of that and them's being built on frostbite the same engine fuelling vices games for the last decade this is a powerful engine but it's difficult to use and not really meant for the kind of game that Bioware are making this means that they have to create a lot of systems from the ground up which takes up a lot of development time there were also things that just wouldn't work for example Bioware wanted massive creatures in the game before spike struggled to handle it the idea was just scrapped so a lot of the stuff had spent five years planning couldn't even be coded into the game okay a lot of pressure now and EA decided to start taking engineers from Bioware to help on other games the developers start to realize that the game they wanted to make cannot be created in the current timeframe so they cut back on scope at the start of development they wanted to have multiple cities couldn't do that so they then went for a city in a player created outpost couldn't do that one city in a mobile ship nope they ended up with a fort also Bioware's management issue in official mandate to staff the game was to be unnameable unlike a certain other game one avenue of meme prevention was actual face animation so they spent a lot more money on motion capture really advanced motion capture and they only had one shot at it because of the high cost they ended up changing a few of the missions later down the line only to realize that they had no time or money to recapture the audio and footage this results in dialogue that doesn't really make any sense the team also doesn't really know what's working and what isn't because they were rarely able to actually play test the game this is because Bioware had server problems that prevented them from logging on they're essentially making the game blind now the majority of this is actually the fault of Bioware's upper management and not EA so even in the game's current condition EA aren't gonna budge on the release date they scraped together all they possibly can in the few short months left and on the 22nd of February anthem launches turns out it's even worse than ant Amida one of the biggest problems is on ps4 playing anthem sometimes causes its entire operating system to shut down then there's the loading screens in some cases they take longer than actual missions and as we've come to expect by now the game is also very buggy besides that the game also lacks content it's a Loutre shooter but the loot a bit broken the story's half-assed and two-thirds of the end game er recycled from previous levels some players also notice that the game they received was a bit different to what EA advertised a few years ago once again that's because development hadn't even started at that point nonetheless the game goes on to be the us's fifth best-selling game in 2019 the main caveat was that the people that did Beyer were not big fans as a result it lost a significant portion of his player base in the first couple of months Bioware is currently planning to rebuild the game from the ground up but nonetheless ei Marchon unfolded by the masses of hate they received on a daily basis and what seems like a never-ending mission to bankrupt every studio under them and although EA has made a few reparations and the hate train has died down as a result it's only a matter of time until the conductor's taps back on board and those wheels start spinning again

Channel: big boss

Views: 4,524,816

Rating: 4.8967409 out of 5

Keywords: EA Is Worse Than You Thought, the long dark history of ea, big boss, ea, ea history, electronic arts, history of ea, electronic arts history, rise and fall of ea, ea downfall, ea fail, lootboxes, ea lootboxes, microtransactions, ea exposed, dark side of ea, downfall of gaming, ea news, andrew wilson, gaming greed, gaming microtransactions, gaming news, ea games, ea gaming, ea games rant, mass effect andromeda, anthem, micro transactions, ea microtransactions, ea 2020

Id: pb8edcvgjX0

Length: 19min 21sec (1161 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 18 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/DisastrousLeopard4]

So how’s this Titanfall related tho