demagogue on 8/10/2025 at 00:55
Yeah, at the center of this has gotta be Saudi Arabia's sportswashing campaign.
heywood on 8/10/2025 at 01:14
I agree, but EA sports franchises are only as valuable as the player, league and federation licenses. The NFL (for example) and its players association may offer a license for future NFL games to a competing publisher.
Starker on 8/10/2025 at 01:17
Really, is there anything worse that EA can do at this point? They made Ultima into a F2P ARPG, ruined Cannon Fodder by boiling out anything that made it unique and memorable, morphed Micro Machines into a soulless Hasbro advert, made Dungeon Keeper and Deer Hunter into sloppy cash grab mobile games, turned Syndicate into an FPS that nobody asked for, Mass Effect and Dragon Age have gotten worse and worse with each game, Dead Space is all but dead. How many games do they still have left that they haven't run completely into the ground or ruined with excessive monetization attempts?
Pyrian on 8/10/2025 at 05:00
Quote Posted by Starker
Really, is there anything worse that EA can do at this point?
I don't ask questions like that anymore. It always seems to turn out that there is.
Fafhrd on 8/10/2025 at 20:13
Quote Posted by heywood
I agree, but EA sports franchises are only as valuable as the player, league and federation licenses. The NFL (for example) and its players association may offer a license for future NFL games to a competing publisher.
No other publisher has as strong a sports division as EA. 2K is close, but when people think 'American Football Video Game' they think 'Madden' not '2K NFL Playmakers.' And even without FIFA, EA has a lock on soccer. The licensors are going to stick with wherever they get the biggest return. So unless there's an actual effective gamer boycott (Gamers Actually Do a Boycott Challenge: Difficulty Level: Impossible) of EA after the acquisition, they'll stick with EA.
Tomi on 9/10/2025 at 07:23
Quote Posted by Starker
[EA] ruined Cannon Fodder by boiling out anything that made it unique and memorable
Hmm. What have I missed here? As far as I know, there have been no "official" Cannon Fodder games since Cannon Fodder 3 around ten years ago, but that was made by some small Russian dev and had nothing to do with EA. Codemasters bought Sensible Software fifteen years ago (and then recently were bought by EA ofc) but even they never did anything with the franchise apart from releasing some GameBoy version of the original Cannon Fodder.
I'd love to see a modern Cannon Fodder game but I think it'd have to be by some smaller developer.
Starker on 11/10/2025 at 04:38
Yeah, I thought EA and Codemasters were responsible for Cannon Fodder 3, but I guess I must have mixed up the timeline of EA buying Codemasters with Codemusters buying out Sensible Software and I thought it was EA buying Codemasters 15 years ago. With how many games and companies EA is ruining, it's getting hard to keep track. Of course, then it takes Micro Machines off the list as well as it must have been before EA acquired Codemasters as well.
In any case, here's a chunky list of major games that suffered under EA:
(
https://screenrant.com/video-game-franchises-ea-ruined/) https://screenrant.com/video-game-franchises-ea-ruined/
