(clanking)
- [Mechanic] There's too
much car in this car!
- What the hell are you doing?
Get the hell out of here!
Every fucking morning with this guy.
- [Mechanic] Surprise!
(laughing)
(upbeat rock music)
♪ Born different, born innocent ♪
♪ Born perfect, I'm not like you, I'm a ♪
♪ Born lover, born livid, and I know I'm ♪
♪ I'm not like you, I was ♪
♪ Born clever, born knowledgeable ♪
- Lately, everyone's talking
about Instagram person
Belle Delphine selling her
dirty bathwater as gamer girl
water for people to own
for sentimental reasons.
Now, anyone who buys
that is an idiot, a fool.
They've been duped.
Not because they bought the
dirty water in the first place
but because they missed the real bargain,
a bottle of Jessica Nigri's sick.
(sniffing)
Burritos!
And...
Gamer girl bathwater?
What have you been drinking?
Recently, gamesindustry.biz
published an article
titled EA: I Struggle With The Perception
We're Just A Bunch Of Bad Guys.
The headline quoting Electronic Arts's EVP
of strategic growth, Matt Bilbey.
The article is a discussion
with Bilbey that attempts
to frame EA as a misunderstood
hero, at least in the eyes
of independent developers.
Behind the big blockbusters,
writes gamesindustry,
EA is offering very friendly
deals for indie developers.
Let's go, EA, rah rah rah!
The argument in favor of
EA, as presented by Bilbey
and replicated pretty much
without question in the article,
is that because supports
a number of indie games,
it's not really that bad of an egg.
The EA Originals label,
which signs on indie talent
and has helped bring us
games like A Way Out,
Unravel, and Sea of Solitude,
is indeed a pretty good deal
for any talented studio,
considering the entirety
of the profit goes back to said studio.
But when it comes to weighing
this one act of financial
generosity against the negative
impact that Electronic Arts
has had on the industry,
does one hand wash the other?
Because EA has done a good thing,
does that make it a good company?
A positive influence?
I realize that even framing
it as a question on this show
is just a little bit smarmy,
considering we all know
exactly what I think here.
Just in case there was any
doubt, though, I think the best
thing for the entire
game industry would be
for Electronic Arts to
wither and die and have its
head offices cleansed
with exorcists and acid
and flamethrowers and, like,
one massive dog-sized spider
that marches through and
eats the Anthem source code.
25 years at EA and I still
struggle with the external
perception we're just a bunch of bad guys,
offers Bilbey in a weak
piece of corporate apologia.
We love making and playing games.
Unfortunately, when we
make mistakes on games,
the world knows about it because
it's of a size and scale.
Aside from the general
flimsiness of the argument,
I must say, I take a very
particular issue with this framing
of EA's less savory deeds as mistakes.
This is not the first time
an Electronic Arts mouthpiece
has tried this particular
line of bollocks.
In fact, companies in
general love to portray
their shenanigans as mere
mistakes, learning opportunities,
and it's a total sham.
In April of 2018, the company
claimed that it made mistakes
with Star Wars Battlefront
II, the game so dependent
on gambling mechanics and
unfun grinding progression
for its monetization that
it triggered an uproar
leading to congressional
interest in the whole practice
of loot boxes, that's how bad it got.
We can shy away from it and
pretend like it didn't happen,
groveled former EA
executive Patrick Soderlund,
or we can act responsibly
and realize that we
made some mistakes and
try to rectify those
mistakes and learn from them.
Cool!
But why didn't you already learn
from those mistakes in the past?
I mean, long before then,
EA's CEO Andrew Wilson
admitted his company might
have misjudged its approach
to Dungeon Keeper Mobile,
a free-to-wait game
which demolished the very
concept of the Dungeon Keeper
series in order to aggressively
coax money from players.
Excavating a single block
of space in the game
could take up to 24 hours,
and you bet your arse
there was a premium
currency you could spend
in order to speed the whole process up,
a fact that the game reminded
of you at every opportunity.
The game was so riddled
with cheap psychological
manipulation that
harassed players for cash,
even the BBC reported on
it, and when the story got
too hot, the robotic CEO
of EA had to come around,
cap in hand, to say that Electronic Arts
misjudged its approach.
For people who'd grown up
playing Dungeon Keeper,
there was a disconnect there.
In that aspect we didn't
walk that line as well
as we could have, and that's a shame,
suggested Android Wilson.
You have to deliver value
and always err on the side
of delivering more value, not less.
Whenever it gets caught out, humiliated,
or strongly challenged
enough, EA will fall back
on claiming it was all a mistake.
And here's the thing.
They're not mistakes.
Perhaps there was a mistake
in getting caught, in feeling
too confident that they'd
get away with their bullshit,
but the bullshit itself
was perfectly planned
and executed according to their designs.
EA's not some drunk football
fan pulling his pants down
in public, it's not a bird
smashing into a window
because it can't see the
glass, it's not a game studio
giving Peter Molyneux a
microphone, it's a multi-billion
dollar corporation run
by many, many executives
with years of experience who
leave very little to chance.
They research the market constantly
and plan well in advance.
And more to the point,
exactly how many times does EA
need to make the same
mistake, vow to do better,
and then fail to do better?
Like in 2016, when it won that
Worst Company America award
that everyone took too seriously.
And again, said they
made mistakes, and again,
vowed to do better.
The claims of making mistakes
ring especially hollow
when you remember that, despite
admitting to its fuckups
in the past, Electronic
Arts is currently fighting
a legal and political
fight to keep loot boxes
in the FIFA series,
pathetically attempting
to rebrand them as surprise mechanics
in an attempt to dress up
their patently shitty behavior.
FIFA's parasitic addiction-fueled
microtransactions
are proof positive that none
of this has been a mistake.
They'll keep doing whatever
they can get away with
for as long as possible, only pretending
it was all a mistake
when they can no longer
salvage any positive PR from it.
That's what EA does, that's
what corporations fucking do.
I'm not kidding when I
say the entire argument
in EA's favor here is
the EA Originals label.
Originals sees EA publish
and promote new games
from indie studios and give every penny
of profit back to the developer,
(applauding)
applauds the article.
EA only takes enough
money to cover its costs.
It's a deal so good that
Jonny Hppper of Glowmade
exclaimed on stage that
he couldn't believe
the contract he had been sent.
To these creators, EA
isn't some super villain.
Quite the opposite.
I defy anyone, even people on the label,
to consider EA a super hero.
(laughing)
I mean, Jesus.
But anyway, as I said, EA
Originals is, objectively,
an amazing deal, and I won't
take that away from them.
But let's juxtapose it
against something else
Electronic Arts does for
smaller companies, shall we?
Namely, how it buys up,
strips down, and kills off
almost every independent
developer it can scoop up.
EA is so habitual about
this, I once famously
coined the term Unicronic Arts to describe
its destructive consumption
of smaller companies.
The list of EA's victims here
is almost farcically long,
and includes not just
studios it bought out,
but its own home-grown
subsidiaries as well.
Bullfrog Productions, Westwood
Studios, Origin Systems,
NuFX, Pandemic Studios,
Playfish, Black Box Games,
Phenomic Game Development, Victory Games,
Mythic Entertainment, Maxis Software,
to name but some of them.
One of its own children, Visceral Games,
was shut down just last
year, and many fear BioWare
could be next, because
it follows the pattern.
The pattern of a developer
once beloved for some things
straying further and and
further away from the thing
that made it beloved at the
behest of its publisher,
eventually slipping into critical duds
right before the axe
comes down on the neck.
Many of the companies
swallowed up by Unicronic Arts
are known for particular
types of game experiences
that EA systematically
directed them away from
before making them
produce so many disasters,
they got killed off as part
of so-called restructuring.
Mythic, for example, was responsible
for the despicable Dungeon Keeper Mobile
shortly before it was ignobly executed,
so Electronic Arts will have to forgive me
if I don't think EA Originals
is a good enough reason
to see the company as anything
other than the predatory
piece of shit it routinely acts like.
If it looks like an exploitative,
cynically-motivated,
money-hungry corporation and
acts like an exploitative,
cynically-motivated,
money-hungry corporation,
then it probably is an exploitative,
cynically-motivated,
money-hungry corporation.
And Electronic Arts, in case
you've not followed along,
is an exploitative, cynically-motivated,
money-hungry corporation.
And it's not like the EA Originals label
is entirely altruistic.
I mean, look how much
they're mining it for PR.
Just like with its addiction-fueled
economies, the buying up
and killing off of smaller
companies isn't a mistake.
EA didn't accidentally
buy company after company,
run them into the ground,
and kill them off,
it's part of its business model.
It's what EA does.
It's what corporations fucking do.
In March, EA laid off 350 employees.
In this past year, EA
executives have seen their
financial compensation raise by 130%.
CEO Android Wilson and had
some glowing little headlines
for himself when he said in
a recent interview that EA
executives have generously surrendered
their bonuses to distribute
among the workforce,
though such headlines failed
to note that the executives
shouldn't have even
been in line for bonuses
following the company's
poor financial results,
and that Andrew Wilson's bold,
brave decline of such a bonus
on top of what he already
earns was pretty much nothing
to a man with a net worth of
at least 125 million dollars.
EA will keep having rounds
of layoffs as part of
restructuring while
its executives continue
to raise their take-home pay.
This is a company that will
plead poverty and say it has to
put microtransactions into
its games and it has to keep
letting go of hundreds
of people at a time,
and yet it will still
manage to find a reported
20 million dollars in
bonuses to try and keep
a single executive from leaving.
It's often easy to overlook,
usually because the amount
is so big it becomes damn near
abstract to normal people,
but it's easy to overlook
exactly how much money
is flowing directly into
the pockets of executives
while they wring their hands in public,
lamenting the necessity of their layoffs.
And we've mostly focused
on recent stuff here.
EA's been pulling stunts
and nonsense forever.
EA had microtransactions
shoveled into Dead Space 3,
for example, being among the
first companies to embrace
psychologically-insidious
microtransactions
of the sort we recently
discussed in a video
as deliberately, malevolently addictive.
Before microtransactions,
EA was in the vanguard
of companies experimenting
with exactly how far
it could take the notion
of downloadable content,
indulging in what was
once called day-one DLC,
but has now been so
disappointingly normalized
with things like season passes
and in-built premium storefronts.
Ah, the days when day-one
DLC was a big issue.
I miss that now.
Under EA's leadership, a
color, fun, lighthearted
Insomniac game went from this...
(energetic rock music)
To whatever tired, dated, humorless,
focus-tested guff this is.
- [Narrator] It's volatile, unpredictable,
and when combined with other elements,
shit gets really weird.
It's what makes our weapons so--
(blowing raspberry)
- EA loved the idea of the
online pass as a used game
countermeasure, even putting
them in single-player games
like Kingdoms of Amalur.
EA fought tooth and nail to
keep SecuROM in its games,
even as credible criticism
continued to mount up
over the shady DRM.
Pretty much any controversial
corporate tactic,
any anti-customer business
model, any sleazy shenanigans
that the so-called triple A
game industry has conceived,
Electronic Arts has jumped on board with
gleefully and maliciously, not mistakenly,
but fully bloody purposefully.
It's what EA does, it's what
corporations fucking do.
And in all that time, a
dismaying number of people
across games media have
acted as their cheerleaders.
Way back in 2012, IGN
published a notorious article,
titled Why Do People "Hate" EA?,
and sought the answer to
that question by asking
none other than EA itself.
Not anyone who actually
expressed criticism of EA,
all of whom were written off as a minority
who write mean things on the internet.
No, it asks EA why people
hate EA, and as a result,
published unchallenged
propaganda from then company man
Peter Moore, trotting
out weak excuses like
"a corporation's primary
concern is making money",
which apparently justifies
anything they do,
or that it's just trying
to figure things out
in a changing market.
The article even went so
far as to handwave away
the notorious EA spouses
debacle, one of the earliest
controversies involving
dangerously stressful
crunch periods inflicted
on overworked developers.
At the time, EA was under fire
for excessive crunch time,
an issue one of its subsidiaries
is still involved in
due to the stories we now
know about Anthem and the
so-called stress casualties
suffered by developers there.
IGN's shrugging response at the time?
My guess is that EA is probably
no worse a place to work
than anywhere else, probably better.
If the focus of your hate
is working conditions at EA,
I want to gently suggest
you also consider clothing
factories in southeast
Asia, or diamond mines
in southern Africa, or fast
food outlets in the Midwest.
(inhaling deeply)
Ooh, yikes, and...
(inhaling deeply)
Ooh, friend, ooh.
Not a great look, even back
then, let alone through the lens
of the modern day, where
crunch in the game industry
is finally being taken fucking seriously.
Yeah, thanks for leading the charge
on that conversation, by the way, guys.
I bring this up because
it's an ongoing problem.
Just last week, we looked at
a Polygon-published defense
of loot boxes, which I
think, years from now,
just like with this IGN article,
is gonna be a really bad look one day.
It frustrates me when
the lies, propaganda,
and utter gibberish coming
out of EA executives' mouths
are reprinted without objection.
Of course Peter Moore thought
EA hatred was overblown!
Of course Matt Bilbey
struggles with the idea
of EA being seen as a bad guy!
They're speaking for the
self-interested fucking companies!
It's like asking the Mouth of Sauron
why Mordor gets such a bad rap!
And while are there some
brilliant reporters out there
shining a spotlight on some
abuses in the game industry,
far too much media just props
the ship up and encourages it
and helps it perpetuate.
And it's not that I'm bitter
about the fact that we did
some reporting on the
abuses going on at Rockstar
that were completely fucking
ignored by the games press,
but I am bitter about that, yes.
EA doing one good thing
does not make it a good guy.
WWE takes part in a huge anti-bullying
charity campaign every year.
It also performs shows in
Saudi Arabia for blood money
and actively helps whitewash perception
of the country's despotic regime.
One good thing does not
make up for what EA does.
For what fucking corporations fucking do.
Electronic Arts can
struggle with the perception
of being a bunch of bad guys all day long.
They are a bunch of bad guys.
Most triple A publishers are bad guys.
And I say that wholeheartedly.
I say that as someone who has
spoken to gambling addicts,
spoken to shopping
addicts, spoken to the prey
that these fucking game companies go after
with their so-called surprise mechanics
and their recurrent user spending.
And while talking to these
people doesn't make me
an expert on the matter of addiction,
it makes me a fuck sight more of an expert
than Electronic Arts itself, a
company that has demonstrated
zero interest in finding out
just what a negative influence
it has on people.
Drink it!
No, I don't want to!
Drink it, Miniature Fantasy Willem Dafoe!
No, no, avenge me!
I'm done with the propaganda,
with the cheerleading,
with the apologia.
Electronic Arts really can go fuck itself.
And there have been articles out there,
there have been spokespeople out there,
who have tried to discredit
criticism of EA because people
like to say fuck EA, but the thing is?
I don't feel ashamed saying fuck EA,
you can't shame me for saying
it, because I believe it.
Because EA should go get fucked.
So yes, fuck EA.
Yes, EA is a bunch of bad guys.
Yes, they're loot boxes,
not surprise mechanics,
and yes, they do have a
detrimental, harmful effect,
and yes, Electronic Arts has
bought and killed studios
as a routine, as part
of its business model,
because it's what companies do, and yes,
companies overall are a bunch of bad guys,
because they wouldn't piss
on you if you were on fire,
not unless you gave 'em five bucks first,
and you'd think five
bucks wouldn't be much
to a corporation, but they
would stab a baby for a dollar.
And if there's one thing
you can definitely all say,
without reservation, without hesitation,
you can all say thank God for me.
(upbeat music)
♪ Everybody's thinkin' 'bout me ♪
