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Plenty of PC gamers out there have had their issues with EA. The publisher has come out with unfinished games, implemented microtransactions into single player content and in some cases, just treated the PC platform as secondary to consoles. However, EA has made a bit of a turn around since then and now, the publisher wants to regain the trust of PC gamers.
Speaking out recently, EA's Senior Marketing Director of Origin, Peter O'Reilly said (via: MCV): “We are on a journey to regain the trust of the PC gamer. Over the last couple of years we have focused on ensuring a great play experience from launch and bringing players a better experience on Origin with programs like the Great Game Guarantee, On the House, and now Origin Access. We’re excited about the progress we’ve made, but are always pushing ourselves to innovate on behalf of players.”
While Star Wars Battlefront may have an overpriced season pass, that shouldn't change the fact that EA has been trying to make an effort on the PC side in the last couple of years. Origin has transformed from being forced software that nobody wanted to actually being a decent service, with free games up for grabs monthly, decent customer support and now Origin Access, which gives you access to a vault of pretty good games for £3.99 a month.
KitGuru Says: EA was in a bad position PR-wise a few years back but honestly I think the publisher has improved a lot. Battlefield 4 is fixed now, Origin isn't bad and most of EA's recent games have performed pretty well on the PC. Do any of you still hold a grudge against EA? I'll admit that it can get carried away with its season pass pricing but aside from that, it sure has been a while since it did something bad enough to rile everyone up.
Headline should read:
EA wants more access to PC gamers wallets, will say anything to look like they care.
FACT.
We’ll see. I’m skeptical as with any corporate message. EA does indeed offer nice games for free, but Origin is still not a good competitor for Steam.
But the anger runs deep with a lot of the community. As soon as they see EA, all reason is lost. No matter what they’ll do, EA will always be seen by such people as the incarnation of Satan. Strange, because their policies are no more evil than that of any major competitor, less so than most. But then, I said reason was lost.
I do not think EA are that bad at all, Blizzard and Ubisoft are the worst ones followed by Rockstar I would say!
Rockstar being more concerned about fixing bugs that hurt their pockets instead of important bug fixes and hackers!
Blizzard being a mass produced same thing and not caring about most modern bugs and errors in their game and just fixing when they can be asked!
Ubisoft, which go by many names but I like to call them Ubiliars, which have released far more incomplete games than EA, micro transactions, game breaking, bugs, errors, crashes and unoptimised, showing one thing and releasing another, hyping so much in one area to promote but in fact removing that area, just to make a false hype to promote stuff, then followed by stupid high price tags for games that are worth half the price…. Ubisoft are one of the worst developers I think and more of a console developer with PC porter…. I will never buy another Ubisoft game ever, EVER!
There is so much more I could say to this lying, false fraudulent money grabbing company but it’s best not too!
So personally I do not have a problem with EA, only BF4 at release and now since been fixed. They do charge a lot of money for their games. I will be buying Plants Vs Zombies Garden Warfare 2 on Origin when I can!
I do not like Origin that much but I do not use it unless I have too. Being the way BF games are loading through the browser, I do not use it because it auto loads 🙂
The past two years they learned to stop making stupid public statements. For the most part it worked as it seems Ubisoft and Rockstar are vying for worst company now. But, EA has burned many a gamer before and it’s not strange at all for these people to be skeptical of anything the company says. It’s not a loss of reason, there are many examples of gross broken products they charged $60 (BF4, ME3, SimCity, DS3… the list goes on)
We hear this every year (and not just from EA) “We care about PC”, “We want gamers to trust us again”. All talk, but very little action. Hell just last week Ubisoft said the exact same thing… again.
R* have overtaken grEAdy imho for being a shite company. 8 months of not being able to play GTA V and their best fix was to try running the game with no usb devices attached and no virus protection running. apparently they hadn’t seen the issue i have been having yet their forums are full of people with exactly the same issue and most of them it started after the first update. i wouldn’t know as the first update had already been done by the time i got the game.
How about EA started to actually make good products instead of whining about their reputation has gotten bad over the years ?
I got a few tips for them.
1. Stop making games more and more dumbed down, your games hold the players hand all the way, its to easy and gets boring fast. Features like 3D spotting has always been a terrible idea, alone that feature has cost you many customers in games like BF, you gained nothing and yet keeps trying to defend the concept.
2. Start listening to what gamers actually want, there are PLENTY of people out there that understands how core mechanics should work and how the basics should be done, EA has totally lost this and just aim for the masses and short term sales – this strategy will hurt EA’s reputation in the long term and in the end hurt sales.
3. Stop making payed DLC crap, make it a one time payment, give everyone the same stuff from start to end no matter how they pay.
4. Get back to the roots and understand whats makes players LOVE your game, listen to feedback from vetarans(long term gamers) and forget the kids hat only think about leveling, perks, bonuses and other pointless crap.
5. Release the editors. Some of the most popular titles of all time comes from MODS, etc. Counterstrike. Release the editor tools from frostbyte/BF and you will see alot of sales long term.
6. Give honest and direct answers to you customers questions/suggestions, you bee absolutly terrible at this. It’s important, even if the answers show weakness from the game engine / developers. The gamers want to know you are at least trying to meet their request.
Ea has already destryed several once epic game series like Command & Conquer and Battlefield.
Get back to the roots and stop screwing around with duming down games.
In current state EA suck big time and they deserve their bad reputation.
The return of the annual “We love the PC platform” message from the likes of EA. Just like Ubisoft, I don’t view EA as a PC gaming friendly videogames publisher due to draconian DRM practices and rubbish support which have put paid to plenty of once grand studios not to mention franchises and games that made their start in the PC gaming space.
Even EA’s ‘Origin’ namesake is testament to it’s shambolic short sighted goals where the best you could hope for as a PC gamer was a badly optimized ports of games developed to cater for a console audience anyway. That a spiritual successor to Wing Commander (of Origin studios fame) is raking in as much money as it has already to fund its development indicates to me, at least, how out of touch these giant publishers really are.
My wallet reacts to positive action on behalf of these developers and not at all to these nonsense PR statements.
I’ve avoided EA PC gamers for a reason. But then, few developers have managed to take PC seriously. Ubisoft is a lot worse than EA with the crap that they’ve produced, and let’s not forget Warner Bros. the absolute biggest screw-up of 2015.
The On The House games are so old, that my grandmother has no recollection of them…
Yeah R.I.P Command and Conquer 🙁
put your games on steam or go broke I use steam only
I have origin and have like 10 titles of games, I play Battlefield, that’s the only reason I open up origin, but other game I play is Garden Warfare, the worst ever, keep disconnecting almost all the time when I’m half game. Long ago, I only play pirated games, now I have decent work, I support Dev, bought games, turn out, they just want money. I have steam, uplay and origin. But the prices for origin games, is way off
Good luck with that….
LOL!!
Don’t forget other companies, such as Activision-Blizzard, Ubisoft, Rockstar and WB(?). All five companies are killing the Triple-A gaming industry.
Not unlike Valve though, that make games like Dota 2 and CS:GO that have more cosmetic micro transaction DLC than there are games on Steam. EA aren’t the only ones who want access to your wallets, every company on Earth does. Let’s not forget that EA give away free games, give you access to the games you’ll actually play for €4 a month on PC and Xbox One and have a great return policy. Valve doesn’t have any of these. While it’s obvious that the best place to get your games on PC is Steam and Valve has revolutionised PC gaming back in the day, they are a shitty company and I do wish that all it’s employees eat my shit specifically
The only problem I have with WB is the company’s they get to port games to the PC, while Iron Galaxy has had no problems porting games in the past, their issues with Arkham Knight have been entirely WB’s fault and what the hell happened with MKX. The team for that have just disappeared and now no more DLC for MKX is coming to PC apparently.
Is this KitGurus way of ensuring that they remain on EA’s good side for press related games and content?
No
EA games are much better in quality compared Ubisoft and bethesda games but still lot to improve and EA games costs more atleast in my country.
In my experience (I’ve done PR relations for a major games website for a few years), EA is pretty cool with anything the press writes as long as it’s not needless slander. Most companies are actually; with few exceptions, they respect freedom of the press. So no cynicism required.
As for point 2, EA is one of the most successful publishers in the world. They may not make games you want, but people have been proclaiming for years that EA has a bad strategy, and they are still on top of the market. They know what the average consumer want. Same for point 4, just because you don’t want it, doesn’t mean it’s not what a large portion of the market wants.
EA is a company like any other, they need to make money, and they do so by serving the biggest common denominator. That’s typically not me, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t listening to gamers. It’s arrogant to think that there is only a small market of self-proclaimed hardcore gamers.
That’s the thing though. CS:GO micro transactions are simply cosmetic. There aren’t any “pay to win” sorts of things, really. There may be a few. But nowhere near to the amount of pay to win shit that EA puts in their games. That’s the difference.
yep, got a free Far Cry, had to get Uplay. Crysis 3, Origon. GFWL? At least that died.
But now I won’t buy GTA 5, as I read you need to register / run – somewhere / something else too.
They mustn’t need my money…
GET Steam to play fair, or sue them for monopoly, or something. Come on, get creative…
It’s not “pay to win” if you’re getting DLC packs to extend the life of the game you bought and don’t try to say that buying battlepacks make the game pay to win considering you earn them in-game very easily and very fast. Being cosmetic isn’t the point, it’s a major greedy practice, albeit the most genius way of making cash in history, still shady. You can’t really blame Valve though because they’re not really going to make money off CS:GO anymore because everyone owns it and Dota 2 is free. This is their form of up keep for those games. DLC expansions are EA’s way of to pay for the up keep of there’s. These company’s are trying to make money and that’s the only goal of a company is to earn relevant income to sustain the company itself, but when you buy their product, they can’t be considered greedy if you get something out of it too. If you think EA are greedy fuckers well then your Landord is greedy, Valve are greedy, Sony, Microsoft, Dell, Bush Toshiba you name it, all a bunch of greedy fucking cunts just because they won’t give you something at their expense, sorry lad but that’s not how the world works. “Pay to win” my fucking dick, you get a gun from a DLC pack that’s average at best in a Battlefield game and it’s “pay to win” because people who are better than you kill you with it and everyone’s using it because they’ve bough the map packs but you haven’t well surely it’s a “pay to win” game. No not really, they are using the gun because it’s new. Not because it’s good, if you’ve played a battlefield game before then you’d know that all the guns that are in a specific weapon class (AR rifles, SMG etc.) then you’d know they’ll all have very similar stats. I’ve bought the map packs to BF3 & 4 and the guns you get from them are just average weapons and in Hardline, Visceral release free weapons along with the paid ones you get from the map packs and the free ones are a tad bit better than the DLC guns. The term “pay to win” implies and advantage locked behind a pay wall, but EA games don’t really have that so ya.
It’s EA.
They can fuck off.
Its a complete Hacker Fest and smurf fest! Now they messed with the ranking system and all the players I know for years are leaving and finding other games. Sux VAC is a joke and the game is now a joke in the US I know
You are right, cant argue with what you are saying. Still, they are wasting their potential, and yes it’s my opinion, but there is no doubt alot agree with me. The player base for BF4 is nowhere near that of BF2 and its once large mod base. It’s with good reason EA previous forum was called “mordor”, it was a gigantic forum/community and i been around there long enough to say that the majority of users there was greatly unsatisfied with the direction the BF series was going adn EA did nothing to adress it, they resonses was close to non exsistent and they largely igonored all idead and suggestions. The whole thing was shut down instead and people where getting banned left and right. The longlevity of their games is going downwards ever since BF2, all before that was much more respected, even to this day. They are ot releasing mod tolls any more cause they want to be in charge if where their games are going, they dont want others to create wastly supperior games using their tools. Im not in doubt the modders are much better at delivering games that are better and more fun, EA dosnt want that. They think it will hurt their pockets and thats where they are wrong. They could sell tons licens that way and it would result in mich higher quality. Instead they go solo, igonore their community and deliver showelware. Fact is they destroyed C&C and they are half way intot the process of destroying the BF series. Thank god other company are well underway in creating titles where they include the community to create games “we” actually want and will be strong long term, just look at Squad etc, its thundering forward with a small team of just 30 strong, yet it already surpasses BF in its core gameplay, totally oppesite strategy, no paid DLC, a well known history for supporting their games even 10 years after they where done and their developers are respected as if they where gods themselfes. My point of view is, EA is going downhill with their core products and others are slowly but steady taking over and they are using a completly different strategy in co operation with the gamers instead of going ego like EA.
Who is taking over really? I’ve been disappointed in every AAA game this generation. I have a PS4 only for PS3 games. There are no major publishers that do things right. To me, EA is simply the most infamous one, and mostly because their past screw-ups (Bullfrog, Westwood).
Exactly This. They forget why they were voted worst company in the world for 2 years running.
Origin is a Horrible and extremely invasive piece of software. As long as any game is linked to EA or Origin, i’ll never buy another product of theirs. Starwars Battlefront Proves that they simply dont listen or care about gamers. Its all about milk milk milk more money.
EA clearly doesn’t get it or get PC gamers. If they did, then they would realise that we don’t WANT their crappy Origin system. We don’t WANT multiplayer forced into our games, we don’t WANT games that are on life-support from day one due to server requirements, we don’t WANT games that have mobile apps or forced features that don’t belong, we don’t WANT microtransations and other Pay-to-Win nonsense, we don’t WANT crappy reboots that miss the point entirely, we don’t WANT forced online features in otherwise single-player experiences, we don’t WANT every major title to be aimed at the same mainstream millennial audience, we don’t WANT editions that only console players get or require digital Origin preorders only, we don’t WANT you to forgo and ignore Steam completely, etc.