Electronic Arts - Why They're Hated

[Music] electronic arts for decades now they've been one of the largest most impactful makers of video games their sales have been increasing along with the rest of the industry now reaching over 5 billion a year and that's because over that time they've been making some of the world's most popular best-selling video games among countless others they're the company behind the sims need for speed madden and fifa yet i don't think many of you will be surprised to hear that over the years ea has not had the best reputation in fact they've been commonly referred to as the evil empire and that may not even be the worst of it how about this the consumerist was a popular website that held this tournament each year asking people to vote for the worst company in america i think that you can see where this is headed but in 2012 250 000 people cast their vote for ea making them the winner they beat out some tough competition too those brackets contained airlines retail stores banks so many people were surprised at the time when a maker of something fun like video games took the title and they were actually a two-time winner they won that same tournament the following year as well further evidence of the hatred is a full six years later they were included in usa today's list of america's top 20 most hated companies and right here on this channel as recent as 2020 i started this series profiling the most hated companies and on every one of them ea is talked about all over the comments this right here has actually been one of my most requested videos since the start of that series so today i want to identify some of the major reasons behind that hatred just to be clear i'm not trying to convince anyone of anything i have no personal agenda against them but i do recognize that they are disliked by many people and i want to talk about why electronic arts was founded by trip hawkins in what i would consider to be the early days of home video games and i have to say that even before ea existed this was a person with an impressive resume he had graduated from harvard received an mba from stanford and went on to become one of apple's first 50 employees in the late 1970s after four years at apple he left the company with the intention of starting his own business from home where he would make and sell video games for home computers the original name of the business was amazing software with an apostrophe but it was quickly changed to electronic arts the reason for that change is because he strongly felt that each video game was its own work of art the developers were the artists and the name should reflect that i would have to agree with that and say that this sounds like the perfect mentality to start a business like this within the year he received five million dollars from private investors used the money to hire about a dozen employees relocate the operations outside of his home and actually put out some of their first video games early on the ideas were famously from independent creators from outside the company and their names were featured on the cover of the games i am not the first one to point out that they resembled musical album covers and i'll go on the record saying that this one for pinball construction set is one of the coolest covers that i have ever seen another notable game around this time was dr j and larry bird go one on one a long title and the game itself is what it is but it can be considered the early roots of ea sports and it established the practice of using sports personalities in the production and marketing of their games most famously seen in the john madden series starting five years later they began distributing their own games straight to the retailers and by the end of the 1980s electronic arts was the leading producer of software containing computer games but you know by this time it was starting to look like consoles were becoming the more promising market there were far more owners of tvs than computers and the nes the most popular system on the market was taking advantage of that fact the issue for them was that nintendo said ea can only make games for the nes if they weren't made available on any other system ea then took a big risk by passing on those terms and instead placing their focus on the newly introduced sega genesis in 1989 ea raised 84 million dollars through an initial public stock offering and a significant portion of the money was put toward producing games for the genesis through the early 1990s the pairing of sega and ea helped propel both of them forward and you could see how it helped their sales grow in 1992 their sales for console games surpassed their sales for pc games and in the following year over half of that 300 million dollars in revenue came solely from sega games that's how electronic arts became a force in the video game industry and up until this point as far as i know anyway they were pretty well liked but i'm gonna go ahead and say that this is when they started to run into trouble which brings me to the first reason behind the hatred killing smaller developers believe it or not ea has an extended history of acquiring smaller typically independent video game development companies and well killing them see in 1992 once everything was starting to take off with their sega games ea was looking to take that opportunity to grow their business they were looking to expand internationally and they were looking to expand their game production their second big acquisition was in 1992 when they bought origin systems they were a video game developer going all the way back to the 1980s and the thing that they were most known for was their ultima series it was considered to be a groundbreaking early rpg for the computer well when ea bought origin systems they were now in charge of the development of the famous ultima series two years later when making ultima 8 it is widely believed that the production of it was rushed because ea set an unrealistic deadline the result was a game that felt unfinished that had all these plot holes the same thing happened with ultima 9 and because they weren't as good their reputation suffered in the sales fell since the sales were down ea discontinued the series and in 2004 shut down origin systems altogether now i know it's not all this simple and direct but from the public's perception ea took control of a perfectly good developer forced them to put out some bad games and then shut them down because of it another example is what happened with bullfrog this was a video game developer from the uk again going back to the 1980s that was most known for their strategy games like populist well in 1995 they were bought by ea they even put out a successful game called dungeon keeper under their control but by 2001 bullfrog no longer existed because they were merged into ea uk again they're stories of russian games but here the biggest issue may have been the culture shock for bullfrog ea turned the whole thing into more of a professional operation and the new environment may have hindered their creativity but either way the fact remains that ea bought a promising successful game developer and six years later they were effectively shut down i won't keep going through the same story over and over but a third major example is westwood studios yet another game developer going back to the 1980s that was best known for their command and conquer series they were bought by ea as part of a larger deal valued at 122 million dollars in 1998 and five years later they shut down when ea consolidated some of their studios there are many more examples of this but we could see the pattern here do you know that book of mice and men lenny loved those rabbits but he would accidentally kill them by hugging them and petting them too hard that's what i think was happening here ea wanted those developers to do so well that they would try to adapt them to their own proven system involved setting aggressive deadlines and introducing a comparatively strict and more professional corporate culture but their attempts to make things better ended up backfiring they stressed everyone out and hindered creativity and i want to point out that this is such a contrast to how they started they are called electronic arts yet they really seem to undermine the artistic aspect of it trust me the whole video could be about this but i need to move on to the second reason because it's probably the most relevant one today you may know where i'm heading with this it's micro transactions and loot boxes it's essentially when you have to pay real money to unlock stuff within a game and ea has been infamous for including these all over the place we have to admit that these are an effective way for ea to keep a stream of revenue coming in long after the game is sold but it doesn't go over well with the players oh man i have to pay a micro transaction to unlock that's so i'm sure many of you know about these all too well so i'll just skip to the big one i'm talking about star wars battlefront 2. back in 2017 before it was ever even officially released it received unprecedented backlash from the gaming community because the loot box system within the game was designed to give the player significant gameplay advantages essentially making it pay to win and nobody wants that you would spend 60 dollars for the game up front and then if you refuse to pay more money you'd be at a disadvantage compared to the other players oh my gosh and on top of that major desirable characters such as luke skywalker and darth vader had to be unlocked by either playing the game for something like 40 hours or by buying these loot boxes the whole thing felt very shady it seemed like ea was more concerned with extracting money from the players rather than delivering a fun experience they actually claimed that all this was in place to provide players with a sense of pride and accomplishment for unlocking heroes but that didn't go over well either it was actually said in a reddit comment that soon became reddit's most downvoted comment of all time disney is the owner of star wars and even they took issue with it the necessity of those loot boxes to play the game properly was promoting gambling to the players and just the whole backlash was turning into negative publicity for star wars and it looks like that right there may have been the final straw that made ea finally fix some of these issues with the game my final reason behind this hatred is admittedly smaller than the last two but i think it's worth mentioning exploiting employees and for this i'm mostly referring to these class action lawsuits that they settled in 2006 concerning overtime pay the whole thing started in 2004 when someone made a post on a blog about how their spouse was working at ea for 13 hours a day 7 days a week i mean that's more than 90 hours a week the post received a lot of attention and it led to two separate class action lawsuits filed by the artist and the programmers that were both settled for around 15 million dollars in 2006. in addition they also changed it so that 200 of their employees would be eligible for overtime pay so there we have it three separate reasons behind the hatred that aren't entirely different from each other i would summarize all of this by saying that many of the ea customers in the gaming community in general feel that ea is more concerned with making money than anything else it seems like they see their customers as nothing more than a walking bag of money and their employees are nothing more than just a way to get that money from them again i'm not weighing in either way whether this is the case or not because i don't know but things like these do create that perception let me know in the comments what do you think about ea do you see them more as an evil empire or a terrific game designer and if you do happen to be on that evil empire side of things do your reasons line up with the ones that i talked about keep in mind it's not a full list you may dislike them for completely different reasons i just perceive these to be the most common or the most significant so any thoughts you have about electronic arts leave them in the comments i'd like to hear what you have to say thank you for watching [Music] you

Channel: Company Man

Views: 1,274,483

Rating: 4.9259033 out of 5

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Id: js6Lh8P6qJg

Length: 12min 2sec (722 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 23 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/KingKomma05]

Hell ya I love this guy’s channel

[u/StoneColdSWAGGA]

Great video! I don’t think capitalism (large corporations) and art (in this case video game development) can work without tremendous trade offs. EA is one of the many examples. It just seems like the larger these companies get, the more their quality diminishes.