oh boy where do we even start welcome to
watchmojo.com and today we’re counting
down our picks for the top 10 EA fails
we don’t know what we’re going to find
up here but it’s clear before we begin
we publish new videos every day so be
sure to subscribe for more great content
for this list we’re looking at EA’s
biggest fails and missteps and ranking
them based on the degree of frustration
anger and disappointment they caused in
gamers number 10 Dungeon Keeper leave it
to EA to ruin a beloved franchise all in
the name of profit dungeon keeper served
as he rebooted to the classic series but
EA hopped on the premium model like
there was no tomorrow the game was
absolutely lousy with microtransactions
and the public cried foul almost
immediately EA was then caught
manipulating Google Play reviews as the
system would filter out any review below
five stars they tried to defend this
practice by saying we wanted to make it
easier for players to send us feedback
directly from the game if they weren’t
having the best experience hmm number
nine command & Conquer cancelled
and here we have EA ruining yet another
beloved franchise in the name of greed I
feel like we’re gonna be saying that a
lot through this list at the 2011 Spike
Video Game Awards it was announced that
EA’s victory games would be handling
command and conquer generals too however
hearts took a real steep dive when it
was revealed that the entire game was
going to be repurposed as a free-to-play
client based game simply titled command
& Conquer
so enjoy the response to this changing
was so toxic that EA just canceled the
game stating your feedback from the
alpha trial is clear we are not making a
game that you want to play yah no duh
bro number 8 origins customer service
more than 21 million people across the
globe are now connecting through origin
did anyone really want a brand new
digital distribution service from EA
even if you did did you really expect it
to be good
Origen has had an enormous amount of
controversies under its belt so where
should we start okay how about the fact
that EA would ban players on their
forums for saying negative things about
the company oh god what if they come
after us or when users read the Terms of
agreement and discovered that EA will
completely delete your account and games
if you don’t log on for two years or how
about the fact that by using Origin EA
could monitor your computer and its data
yeah it was a mess
it’s gotten better but it was a mess
number 7 secure ROM DRM in Spore
[Music]
the hyper spore was well-deserved as the
game looked extremely promising EA
caused a lot of uproar when it was
announced that an individual copy of the
game could only be installed on three
computers this was kind of a mistake as
the backlash hit fast and it hit pretty
hard the game received horrible reviews
on Amazon with many critics citing the
implementation of the DRM and many
people just tired of the game from
torrent sites instead the damage wasn’t
over yet though
soon after release consumer espada
lawsuit against EA
over the implementation of secure ROM by
the way that won’t be the last time you
hear the word lawsuit here number 6
mismanagement of Bioware Montreal this
is how you completely screw over a
development team Bioware Montreal was
created in 2009 mostly to help the main
branch in Edmonton with the Mass Effect
games and their DLC the Montreal team
weren’t given their chance to shine with
Mass Effect Andromeda as the Edmonton
branch was focusing on a new IP I don’t
like the sound of that however the
production was really bungled Bioware
needed to start from scratch to
accommodate the new incompatible
frostbite 3 engine and the game’s
development was horribly rushed as a
result the game was released to a myriad
of technical issues and mediocre reviews
and Bioware Montreal through no real
fault of their own was soon forced to
merge with motive so much for that
number-5 battlefield for release the
release of battlefield 4 was a war zone
in and of itself as many gamers had
issues upon release for some it would
randomly crash in the middle of the game
others were lucky to even get in a match
to sum it up glitches and bugs were
rampant
it all made the game basically an
unplayable disaster for many players and
that resulted in various lawsuits one
suit claimed that EA issued materially
false and misleading statements
regarding the game’s quality while
another suit claimed that they
intentionally kept the games poor state
from investors which violated the
Securities Exchange Act of 1934 one year
after release a producer admitted that
the game’s launch permanently damaged
their reputation and Trust you think
number 4 overworking its employees I’m
gonna need you to go ahead and come in
tomorrow so if you could be here around
9:00 that would be great ok we all know
that working in game development is no
walk in the park and the crunch has
become something of an industry standard
for better or for worse but this is a
whole other level in 2004 a blog was
released which detailed to the terrible
working conditions at EA it was revealed
that regular hours were 9:00 a.m. to
10:00 p.m.
employees worked seven days a week and
they were given Saturday evenings off
for good behavior seriously
what that sounds straight-up dangerous
I’m also gonna need you to go ahead and
come in on Sunday to if that wasn’t all
they also failed to pay overtime this
resulted in two lawsuits artists were
awarded 15.6 million in damages and
programmers were awarded 14.9 million
number three
SimCity drm disaster and launch
ei is not so good at the whole PR thing
these days are they it was announced
that Sim City would be launching with a
form of DRM which required users to
always be connected to the Internet even
if they were playing by themselves
because they’re playing SimCity and why
would you want to play with other people
at Sim City you have a little box full
of time to address the complaints EA
said that the game’s multiplayer
component was massive and as such it
required cloud computing to run properly
well this went about as well as you’d
expect
SimCity experienced a huge server load
upon release and caused many computers
to crash and/or experience a wide
variety of technical issues so that DRM
stuff is real tricky a with no means of
a path he’ll have plenty of time to
consider his inadequacies number 2 new
Star Wars Battlefront 2 PR trainwreck
this one is actually still developing as
we speak
ei had a real goldmine on their hands
but they basically bungled it before
release gamers took notice of the game’s
implementation of loot boxes during the
beta and it all kind of snowballed from
there
days are real
players soon asta mated that it would
take four hours to unlock heroes like
Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader an EI
responded on reddit by saying that it
provided players with a sense of pride
and accomplishment this response su
became the most downloaded comment in
reddit history EA tried backpedaling by
temporarily removing the
microtransactions but the damage was
done another PR disaster resulted from
EA claiming that cosmetic items weren’t
in the loot boxes so they could adhere
to that religious and important Star
Wars Canon like we said this is actually
a still evolving story but as of the
week of recording EA reportedly has lost
3 billion in stock prices thanks to this
debacle ouch
number one the closure of many beloved
development studios rather than I’m
afraid we have a heck of a situation
down here if you ever hear of your
favorite development studio being
purchased by EA make sure you say your
good-byes because chances are it’s just
a matter of time
Electronic Arts has closed a huge number
of beloved development studios
throughout the years including but not
limited to Westwood mythic entertainment
pandemic studios and visceral games to
just name a few by now it seems to be a
gaming tradition that EA purchases a
studio forces them to work on a project
not suited for them and then shuts them
down in a few years so let’s just keep
our fingers crossed that this isn’t the
case for respawn EA’s newest acquisition
[Music]
do you agree with our picks check out
these other great clips from WatchMojo
and subscribe for new videos every day
watchmojo.com and today we’re counting
down our picks for the top 10 EA fails
we don’t know what we’re going to find
up here but it’s clear before we begin
we publish new videos every day so be
sure to subscribe for more great content
for this list we’re looking at EA’s
biggest fails and missteps and ranking
them based on the degree of frustration
anger and disappointment they caused in
gamers number 10 Dungeon Keeper leave it
to EA to ruin a beloved franchise all in
the name of profit dungeon keeper served
as he rebooted to the classic series but
EA hopped on the premium model like
there was no tomorrow the game was
absolutely lousy with microtransactions
and the public cried foul almost
immediately EA was then caught
manipulating Google Play reviews as the
system would filter out any review below
five stars they tried to defend this
practice by saying we wanted to make it
easier for players to send us feedback
directly from the game if they weren’t
having the best experience hmm number
nine command & Conquer cancelled
and here we have EA ruining yet another
beloved franchise in the name of greed I
feel like we’re gonna be saying that a
lot through this list at the 2011 Spike
Video Game Awards it was announced that
EA’s victory games would be handling
command and conquer generals too however
hearts took a real steep dive when it
was revealed that the entire game was
going to be repurposed as a free-to-play
client based game simply titled command
& Conquer
so enjoy the response to this changing
was so toxic that EA just canceled the
game stating your feedback from the
alpha trial is clear we are not making a
game that you want to play yah no duh
bro number 8 origins customer service
more than 21 million people across the
globe are now connecting through origin
did anyone really want a brand new
digital distribution service from EA
even if you did did you really expect it
to be good
Origen has had an enormous amount of
controversies under its belt so where
should we start okay how about the fact
that EA would ban players on their
forums for saying negative things about
the company oh god what if they come
after us or when users read the Terms of
agreement and discovered that EA will
completely delete your account and games
if you don’t log on for two years or how
about the fact that by using Origin EA
could monitor your computer and its data
yeah it was a mess
it’s gotten better but it was a mess
number 7 secure ROM DRM in Spore
[Music]
the hyper spore was well-deserved as the
game looked extremely promising EA
caused a lot of uproar when it was
announced that an individual copy of the
game could only be installed on three
computers this was kind of a mistake as
the backlash hit fast and it hit pretty
hard the game received horrible reviews
on Amazon with many critics citing the
implementation of the DRM and many
people just tired of the game from
torrent sites instead the damage wasn’t
over yet though
soon after release consumer espada
lawsuit against EA
over the implementation of secure ROM by
the way that won’t be the last time you
hear the word lawsuit here number 6
mismanagement of Bioware Montreal this
is how you completely screw over a
development team Bioware Montreal was
created in 2009 mostly to help the main
branch in Edmonton with the Mass Effect
games and their DLC the Montreal team
weren’t given their chance to shine with
Mass Effect Andromeda as the Edmonton
branch was focusing on a new IP I don’t
like the sound of that however the
production was really bungled Bioware
needed to start from scratch to
accommodate the new incompatible
frostbite 3 engine and the game’s
development was horribly rushed as a
result the game was released to a myriad
of technical issues and mediocre reviews
and Bioware Montreal through no real
fault of their own was soon forced to
merge with motive so much for that
number-5 battlefield for release the
release of battlefield 4 was a war zone
in and of itself as many gamers had
issues upon release for some it would
randomly crash in the middle of the game
others were lucky to even get in a match
to sum it up glitches and bugs were
rampant
it all made the game basically an
unplayable disaster for many players and
that resulted in various lawsuits one
suit claimed that EA issued materially
false and misleading statements
regarding the game’s quality while
another suit claimed that they
intentionally kept the games poor state
from investors which violated the
Securities Exchange Act of 1934 one year
after release a producer admitted that
the game’s launch permanently damaged
their reputation and Trust you think
number 4 overworking its employees I’m
gonna need you to go ahead and come in
tomorrow so if you could be here around
9:00 that would be great ok we all know
that working in game development is no
walk in the park and the crunch has
become something of an industry standard
for better or for worse but this is a
whole other level in 2004 a blog was
released which detailed to the terrible
working conditions at EA it was revealed
that regular hours were 9:00 a.m. to
10:00 p.m.
employees worked seven days a week and
they were given Saturday evenings off
for good behavior seriously
what that sounds straight-up dangerous
I’m also gonna need you to go ahead and
come in on Sunday to if that wasn’t all
they also failed to pay overtime this
resulted in two lawsuits artists were
awarded 15.6 million in damages and
programmers were awarded 14.9 million
number three
SimCity drm disaster and launch
ei is not so good at the whole PR thing
these days are they it was announced
that Sim City would be launching with a
form of DRM which required users to
always be connected to the Internet even
if they were playing by themselves
because they’re playing SimCity and why
would you want to play with other people
at Sim City you have a little box full
of time to address the complaints EA
said that the game’s multiplayer
component was massive and as such it
required cloud computing to run properly
well this went about as well as you’d
expect
SimCity experienced a huge server load
upon release and caused many computers
to crash and/or experience a wide
variety of technical issues so that DRM
stuff is real tricky a with no means of
a path he’ll have plenty of time to
consider his inadequacies number 2 new
Star Wars Battlefront 2 PR trainwreck
this one is actually still developing as
we speak
ei had a real goldmine on their hands
but they basically bungled it before
release gamers took notice of the game’s
implementation of loot boxes during the
beta and it all kind of snowballed from
there
days are real
players soon asta mated that it would
take four hours to unlock heroes like
Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader an EI
responded on reddit by saying that it
provided players with a sense of pride
and accomplishment this response su
became the most downloaded comment in
reddit history EA tried backpedaling by
temporarily removing the
microtransactions but the damage was
done another PR disaster resulted from
EA claiming that cosmetic items weren’t
in the loot boxes so they could adhere
to that religious and important Star
Wars Canon like we said this is actually
a still evolving story but as of the
week of recording EA reportedly has lost
3 billion in stock prices thanks to this
debacle ouch
number one the closure of many beloved
development studios rather than I’m
afraid we have a heck of a situation
down here if you ever hear of your
favorite development studio being
purchased by EA make sure you say your
good-byes because chances are it’s just
a matter of time
Electronic Arts has closed a huge number
of beloved development studios
throughout the years including but not
limited to Westwood mythic entertainment
pandemic studios and visceral games to
just name a few by now it seems to be a
gaming tradition that EA purchases a
studio forces them to work on a project
not suited for them and then shuts them
down in a few years so let’s just keep
our fingers crossed that this isn’t the
case for respawn EA’s newest acquisition
[Music]
do you agree with our picks check out
these other great clips from WatchMojo
and subscribe for new videos every day
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