EA has achieved what many had previously thought impossible: winning the Golden Poo two years in a row. Let's think about that for a moment, shall we? Electronic Arts, a company based around producing retail goods and services, has been the most hated company in America (whether they're truly the "worst" is debatable, but that is irrelevant to my point) two years running.
How do they stay in business if their entire business model is based around consumer purchases? How is it that this is one of the most powerful companies in the video game industry and yet so loathed by its customers? Gamers have many reasons to hate their business practices, including various DRM schemes, excessive DLC prices, pushing their subsidiary developers to push games out the door before they are finished, and so on. However, it's really one problem above all others that ties it all together and leads to the ire they've snowballed through for years on end: hubris.
EA is the only company I know of that consistently berates and objectifies its customers. Not just in the way they often mislead their customers into believing things about their products that ultimately turn out to be false, but also by chiding them and calling them "entitled" and "whiny" when people turn up to complain about it. Their customer service reps aside, most of EA's public statements in representation of the company often take on language that is intentionally intended to minimize any fault by EA and place blame squarely on the heads of the complainants.
Ironically, EA would deny this and say that we are dupes for believing so, but that irony would only be invisible to people who've never had to actually put up with EA's bullshit. In almost any other industry, the public at large would be aghast at their behavior, but EA gets a pass because most people just don't understand video games to really comprehend the issues and complaints against EA.
And, quite simply, how could you convince them otherwise? Why on Earth would anyone feel so compelled to despise them, yet still keep coming back for more? Most people who don't involve themselves in video games would think it seems clear that EA must be doing more good than bad (which, again, is determinant on a sliding scale of good and bad, but most of us have concluded that EA has a LOT of bad).
The answer to that question is in the inherent nature of entertainment and intellectual property. Everyone knows that if you dislike an author, you simply don't buy their books. But what if an author you do like were owned by a corporation that could, at any point in time, take that author's work and do whatever they wanted with it? Say, the author had one story in mind, but then the corporate overlords didn't like it so they had them change it. In the case of most novels, this sort of argument with a publisher happens quite a bit, but if the author decides they don't want to, they can quit and go somewhere else. The book might not get published, or it might get published by another publisher, or it might be self published, but it would remain the author's work.
Now, take that back to our corporate overlords. In this case, the author is no longer a partner to the publisher, but instead a direct employee. Their work is not owned by them, it is owned by the corporation, and if the author dislikes what the corporation does with their work, they are forced to either comply or quit. Either way, the company retains ownership of the intellectual property, and do with it what they choose.
Are the fans disappointed? Very often, yes. But do they come back for more because they already have an interest in the outcome? Yes. Unless the company creates something so unlike what came before as to be completely unrecognizable, the fans come back because there is nowhere else to find that IP.
The word "monopoly" comes to mind, though not in the legal sense. It is the monopoly held by EA on its various intellectual properties that gives it such strength. It continues acquiring existing, successful properties and exploiting them until they can no longer produce any revenue. The fans come back because of their love of the series that, in many cases, was not created by EA to begin with. Instead, it was created by someone else and then acquired by EA.
And this is where we find EA with its "too big to fail" power. They exist in a constant state of being hated, but like addicts, people keep coming back for more. And naturally, over the years, this has resulted in EA coming to the conclusion that it can do no wrong; that their customers are built in. In a word, that they are entitled to their customers. And that is where we find ourselves: seemingly helpless in the face of an exploitative enterprise. How long, I wonder, before their hubris brings them to their ultimate downfall?
