How is it 'run very differently'? I haven't seen them do anything good yet. EA still rushes out half finished games and releases the same useless sport titles.
Are you sure? Because I'm still seeing the same sports game re-hashes and half-finished titles that they've become infamous for. If they're run very differently, then it doesn't seem to have any bearing on the final product.
First of all, if you don't care about the useless sports titles, then what does it matter to you if they keep releasing them? Sports fans
want annual game releases, and like it or not, those sports games help them finance other games. Plus, if you look at critical assessment of EA's sports games, at least the FIFA and NHL games have seen a pretty dramatic increase in quality in the last few years. Hell, they came out with skate last year, which I haven't played, but is apparently the most original and unique sports game in years. Furthermore, EA has been taking risks and pushing more and more original IP recently, like Dead Space, Mirror's Edge, Saboteur, Rock Band, and fucking
Spore for crying out loud. They're distributing and at least partially financing all of Valve's products, and are you going to argue about the quality or originality of that?
And on the 'half-finished' front, would the old EA have pushed back Mercenaries 2 for over a year to give it more development time? Would they have delayed Army of Two for four months and
out of a holiday season release when it was supposed to be one of their marquee games for the season? Would they have moved Dragon Age back to 2009, when it's been in development since 2003? Hell, the original release date for Bad Company was March of 2007. Was the game released 'half-finished'? I'm not impugning what Dennis is saying, since I haven't played this game myself, but considering the reviews this game is getting, I doubt it. From what I've heard, spawn camping has always been a problem with the Battlefield games, and it's not specifically with this installment of the series or something that can be blamed on EA. The fact of the matter is, even if the accusation of rushing Bad Company is true, every publisher rushes out games occasionally. They're publicly traded companies, and they have to report to their shareholders and put games out in a given financial quarter.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again, the new evil empire of the video game industry is Activision. After acquiring Blizzard (which as I pointed out in the Diablo 3 thread, hasn't put out an original property in a decade), they're even larger than EA, and they're churning out the most formulaic crap I can possibly conceive at an amazing rate. EA is not the company putting out
five Guitar Hero games in 18 months. The only remotely original games coming out of Activision anymore are the Sierra games, and frankly the only reason those exist is that they were in production before the acquisition. For whatever reason, EA has moved on, but gamers haven't, even though there's a far worse culprit at this point that nobody ever calls out on their bullshit.