re: EA closing in on back to back Worst Company in America title.

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I work in the games industry, and gamers need to inform themselves a bit. EA won this contest because they are being blamed for the death of smaller game studios and trend of adding paid DLC to a game you already paid for.

However the gamers have no one to blame but themselves for this. They demand so much from video game developers that the cost of making video games has skyrocketed into ridiculous proportions requiring full-blown movie studio levels of production staff and budgets. Watch the credits for any current triple-A game title and see for yourself. Meanwhile the price of games at the store haven’t changed much, and have actually gone down if you adjust for inflation.

Any attempt by the game developer to turn a profit larger than what is needed to recoup their development costs is instantly seen as evil by the game community. Yet then the game community wonders why their favorite developers get eaten up by the companies like EA who is one of the few publishers in the industry capable of bankrolling the development of a brand new game from scratch. Their favorite “not evil” developer may have recouped their costs but has no additional funds to start a new game, thus needs to look to an investor like EA or Activision to pay their bills.

That’s the reality, and while EA may not have the best business practices in the industry, they are pretty much on par with any larger corporation in any other industry. The difference here is that in the games industry you have a community with a much larger proportion of people who don’t quite understand how the world works yet.

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