The EA Hate Wagon is a glorious vehicle.
It’s shiny and sexy; adorned with spinning rims and all sort of bells and whistles. What makes it most alluring, however, is that even though it though the weight of all the angry, red-faced screaming gamers who cling to it make the whole thing appear on the verge of collapse, there’s always room for one more.
Let’s face it, it’s easy to hate EA. Really easy.
The company’s history, policies and perceived attitude toward gamers makes the industry giant an easy–and arguably deserving–target. It is a faceless, monolithic corporation that appears to have no qualms about bleeding every last dollar out of consumers. To the many a gamer, EA comes off as a smiling, well-manicured Bond villain- stroking a white cat in high-backed chair and laughing at the foolish, unwashed masses from a shadowy lair.
EA’s recent actions have only made it it easier to cast them as the “bad guy”.
Comments from EA CFO Blake Jorgensen that the company would include microtransactions in “all” its games, and the disaster that was the launch of SimCity have only served to add more high-octane fuel to the Hate Wagon. A blog by multi-millionaire developer Cliff Blazinki, in which he justifies the “anything for a profit” model of capitalism as if it were some virtue we should pat company’s like EA on the back for, also did little to quell the outrage.
So is all the anger justified? Maybe.
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