EA is a bunch of wanna be tech uncles in the bay area who are secretly wishing to fit in with the tech CEOs but don’t have the business model to do it.
See Unity (run by an ex EA CEO who spends a fortune on reputation management services wiping a certain lawsuit of the internet to the point obscure NY italian restaurants show up above his name in Google) wasting the opportunity to become the engine company in games and deliver solid value on ridiculous ads plays trying to become an ad tech company.
These are companies that could have solid business models and solid value. But greed.
EA is actually a parasite. It’s the Vampire Armand from Interview with the Vampire. It takes no risks, it doesn’t innovate because it doesn’t know how and want to - instead it buys already proven ideas, scales them with fat cheques and rides them until they are out of favor, while squeezing the people who build them year after year for 10% layoffs.
And thus it keeps itself alive, decade after decade and the people who run it a fat paycheck, the road littered with the husks of sucked dry studios and broken dreams.
One of many fun aspects: Many projects run on contingent workers who can only work for months out of a year (otherwise law would make them permanent), paid starbucks wages but without starbucks benefits. These workers are tunnels to EA with deals straight out of overpriced schools which approach young people with “100% placement rate” and “job guaranteed” in the hip game industry - tie them with insane student loans and then funnel them into EA.
EA then dangles them the idea that the best performers will be made permanent - appealing to youthful optimism bias - and many of them run 2-3 years with intermittent unemployment before realizing that almost nobody gets made permanent.
By then they are so deep in debt and unable to pay their loans, lack appreciable skills and stuck in a low end job that just hoping keeps them going or drives them to work at Starbucks for better benefits.
It’s pure evil.