Losonti Tokash wrote:There's nothing actually exceptional about them compared to other large publishers,
People always say that and offer nothing to back it up. At the least, no other publisher combines the failure that EA does. Sure, Sony lies about everything and Blizzard has done nothing but cash in on 3 IPs for 15 years, but EA is literally the culmination of everything wrong with the industry. Which is likely because they are so big and also have their hands in every part of the industry.
other than when Valve got pissy at them and temporarily removed some of their games from Steam. Now they've got their own digital distribution service (which also isn't exceptional) that competes with Steam,
Valve were dicks about that, but EA knew the drill with Steam patching going in. Further, Origin had been out for over a year after that happened IIRC. Besides, EA just thinks they're competing with Steam, like they did with SWTOR and WoW and CoD and every other IP they own.
and this makes people very angry.
Probably about as angry as people were dealing with the buggy and broken Steam that replaced WON. However, by the time Steam came around, the only games that required it for online play were those that had been out for over 5 years. Even then, you didn't have to use Steam until WON pulled the plug on their servers. Origin managed to launch with about the same optimization of beta Steam with even less support.
valve made users beta test Steam with dated video games. EA forced it on their customers for brand-new AAA titles. And it says something that there were enough people playing HL, CS, and TFC after so many years to make that possible.
Origin's sales aren't quite as good or often but their customer service is light years ahead and they'll actually give you refunds if you don't like a game you bought from them. I've got a game I bought ages ago that I lost the disc for and they just gave me a free digital copy of it with no fuss.
Are you serious? I got a full refund for FFVII after it ran like a brick on my PC. My ticket was "This port is garbage and doesn't run on my i7. I would like a refund" and had the money back in my wallet in under 2 hours. I've had to open more than a few Steam tickets over the years and the support wasn't A+, but I've recieved what I needed with little fuss. At the least, someone actually responded to me.
Maybe Origin itself has good support (I don't use it for obvious reasons, but you will surely get the karkland), but EAs support all around is dogshit. I learned this the hard way "recently" in SWTOR as I submitted numerous tickets that were closed with canned replies. As did my friends, as did thousands of other players. Even going years back when the BF2 patch broke people's computers (as in, your computer wouldn't boot because the patch deleted key .ini's) EA was in full damage control mode deleting posts and banning users left and right. Kind of like they did with SWTOR. It's basically like a habit for them.
After over a week, they finally posted a fix. It was the same after BF2 would forget it was installed, except you couldn't reinstall it because the installer would say "game is already installed."
And hey, it's not like EA offering refunds wasn't obviously done in response to the brutal hilarity that was Sim City 5. A game so fucking bad and broken, only IGN can really be bothered to give it a happy ending. I'm sure they did it because they're pretty cool guys. valve gets around this by not releasing shitty broken software. At least not since 2003.