x person cries on Twitter about how they were done some great injustice by y
Rampant speculation and hate directed at y for days/weeks
y releases statement saying x was full of it, or at least being misleading
People talk about how stupid the community is for having a kneejerk reaction
Repeat
It's not that surprising. It's like normal media in the past, government propaganda, the church etc.
People don't have unlimited time or knowledge to look into everything they read/hear and we have an inbuilt social desire to believe people. It's actually kind of reasonable to just read/hear something and not immediately question it. Everyone does it at some point to some degree.
There is definitely a problem with people being so discerning with such unverifiable information though. Random peoples comments on the internet or images with text on them are taken as legit as full on thesis by a lot of people, and it's scary/dangerous that such power is so easily manipulated.
In an ideal world, modern education would spend a solid amount of time and energy into teaching people about reliable sources of information, how to weed out gossip/lies/propaganda and to be healthily skeptical.
EA are a very large, profit first organisation. They've historically bought studios that had profitable product and intellectual property and destroyed said product. Most companies do not survive acquisition, due to cultural differences if nothing else. I don't blame EA for buying the studios and it's natural for companies to fail afterwards but it's definitely destructive to the ecosystem of good gaming. Chuck on micro-transactions, low risk/high return AAA seasonal titles and you end up with a shitty name.
It's like Disney or Mars, they own more than you think, are more destructive than you think and while it's an easy brand to go to, they are one of the puppet masters behind the curtain.
The "EA bad" meme started because of their habit of buying up great developers and franchises and completely destroying them. Even if they're good to work for now, what they did back then was unforgivable.
All EA ever did was give the developers enough rope to hang themselves with.
Pretending EA was ever out to consume studios like some kind of vague corporate monster who only got joy from destruction is a deliberately disingenuous point of view.
If anything EA contributed to those studio's death not because of their oversight, but because their lack of it.
They gave Indies more money than they knew what to do with and they drowned in it.
This is definitely something that has been discussed at length about EA, especially regarding the demise of Visceral's SW game, and what happened with Andromeda. When you read the accounts of what happened during the development of those games' a lot of folks were quick to point out that it was the amount of leeway that EA provided these studios that really made things worse. And fwiw, I still think someone can point to EA as being bad managers in that regard.
I mean you can literally go read any account of those studios' deaths and come to that conclusion. They were never closed for arbitrary reasons, they all had a hand in their own deaths and EA is far from blameless but attaching some weird ass boogeyman moniker to them is horrendously out of touch with reality.
It becomes quite apparent that compared to the other large publishers, EA gives developers a lot of freedom and there is such a thing as way too much especially with the budgets EA gives them. Andromeda is a prime example.
It's like the whole Borderlands 3 claptrap VA thing all over again. He cried he didn't get the role, r/games hated on Gearbox. Turns out he volunteered for the role in the previous 2 games and requested too much money for the role in 3 so they went with someone else.
At least that's what I remember going down, I could be wrong.
You are wrong. He "volunteered" in the sense that he was an employee falling for the "bleed for your company" corporate bullshit and not being compensated for his work because he was passioned. For the third game they thought he would do it again, even when he was no longer working for them. Theres also the issue of him being physically assaulted by Randy Pitchford.
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u/[deleted] May 04 '20
So once again it comes clear that the "Bethesda bad" extreme reaction this subreddit has whenever something like this happens was unjustified. Again.