EA Needs To Grow Up, But We Do Too

Once again, EA is the Worst Company in America. Hopefully this will mark a time of self-reflection among the company leaders, bringing about a year with few to no heinous microtransactions and exploitative DLC schemes and anything relating to SimCity ever. But I'd also hope that this will spark some time of self-reflection for the internet and gaming community as a whole, to really work through just how much this company has been demonized and determine if they really deserve it.

I'm now going to make a very important pit stop and mention that no, I'm really, really not a huge supporter of theirs, but their most grievous offense hasn't been Mass Effect 3's ending and I'm not even a player of SimCity. No, I'm still holding against them the scary little marketing campaign of theirs for Medal of Honor: Warfighter, in which they had set up a cross-marketing scheme with actual weapon dealers and encouraged gamers to purchase the real-life versions of weapons featured in the game.

That's a bad thing to me, right there.

With that said, I'd like to direct your attention to a recent interview that Bioware founder Dr. Greg Zeshuck held with Gamesindustry. Zeshuck is retired from the game industry and for all intents and purposes would appear to be in that position for the rest of his life. He writes about beer now. In the interview, Zeshuck spoke fondly of Bioware's time with EA, shooting down the claims many have made of EA taking creative control over Bioware properties:

"EA gives you enough rope to hang yourself… that rope that EA gives you; they don't second-guess you, they don't say you shouldn't do that. We had complete creative control over a lot of it; some fans didn't like some of it and some of it was experimental, quite frankly."

The reactions of N4G commenters have been fascinating.

"Unfortunately their 'complete creative freedom', depends on how much money EA wants to throw at them." 

"I guess EA are officially on damage control." 

"Lies! just like Mass effect 2 and 3 had complete creative control right?"

I want us to take a step back. Greg Zeshuck intends to never return to this industry again. He does not have a vested interest in EA's good name; he will never work with or for them again. The claims people are making come from to the idea that either EA is still paying him off in his retirement so that he will speak well of them when someone happens to interview him, or simply that he has been brainwashed from his time with EA and this is what he legitimately believes.

I haven't seen it cross anyone's mind that, yeah, maybe EA isn't actually the devil.

In a characteristically quality Sessler's Something, Adam Sessler spoke about the recent history of EA and the fact that while their business practices have not all been friendly, they have at least turned a corner from when their selection was based around only weak licensed games and Madden. John Riccitiello, former CEO, does actually play video games, which can't be said of all industry executives. They're not the best, but the worst ever might be a bit of a stretch.

As a game journalist, I know that it is my job to take companies and developers and industry leaders to task when they wrong their consumers. I don't intend to back off from that, and I won't excuse the aforementioned Warfighter controversy, the shocking failure that was SimCity's release, CFO Peter Moore's inability to grasp why people don't like them, or any other wrongdoings they bring about. But in order to cut to what they're really doing wrong, and criticize them constructively, we as a community need to stop demonizing the company to such an extent that all intelligent conversation around them suffers.

The gaming community is made up of many interesting, intelligent people, and I know we all just want these creators to make the best damn games they can. Let's not allow blinding hate to get in the way of that.

P.S. With all due respect to my former colleagues over at Twinfinite, I believe that writing an angry letter to Reddit isn't the solution either.