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Comment by tomkarho | Hacker News Reader

End of an era. Who do we vote as the worst company ever now?

Well at least as far as gaming companies go, Blizzard always seems willing to throw its hat in the ring.

In spite of all the hate, I like that Blizzard's games don't use super nasty DRMs (like Denuvo, which EA, Ubisoft and many others use), all their games work perfectly under Linux (Wine/Proton), and they still host live download links to a game that's nearly three decades old (Diablo 2). Like literally yesterday I set up a new Linux laptop and was about to install Project Diablo 2 under Steam, and was pleasantly surprised to see that the HTTP links to the original D2 and D2 LoD setups were still alive, and the Win 9x-era downloader+installer still works just fine. I mean, how cool is that. And I could even log into battle.net and retrieve my CD keys too. For a 26yr old game.

Yeah, Ubisoft... one of the most depressing game-related events for me was when they took over one of my all-time favorite franchises, the Heroes of Might and Magic series, when 3DO sadly went bankrupt.

Olden Era is really good, it's kind of a spiritual successor to HoMM3.

Thanks for the rec - I'll check it ou!

What I really want (I know I'll never get it) - is a sequel with the charming pixel art graphics of HOMM2 and the game mechanics of HOMM3.

I disagree. They're not gonna give up the brand recognition to rename it. They specifically wanted "Electronic Arts". EA has Battlefield, FIFA, The Sims, and Madden. Those four alone are probably responsible for 90% of the company's revenue.

If anything, now you can say that EA is doubly the worst company, especially in gaming.

EA lost FIFA a few years ago. The games are now "FC". They still sell though.

They didn’t lose FIFA, they let go. FIFA lost EA

Shit. I had a feeling I was fucking up on one of those. The other three are still massive franchises, though.

Another big one is College Football, at least in the US. And in the latest edition they nerfed the offline single-player mode's XP progression. In return they added microtransactions to buy XP points. For offline single-player. Gachaification continues.

I guess it'll keep existing with the name EA? "Public investment fund" doesn't sound too fitting for a game company

EA being voted as the worst company has always been funny to me. The world would be a far better place if it was indeed the case.

The gaming community likes to be extremely dramatic.

It's actually extremely logical if we will step away for a minute from the maximalist black and white, all or nothing worldview. Of course there worse entities out there. This doesn't mean that it is bad/pointless/ineffective to pick a battle with a smaller evil. In fact, it is better to pick a smaller evil.

Can you boycott Palantir? Well, no. Not really. No regular citizen can (to any definition of getting a result). It's like 100% ineffective. But boycotting a much small, consumer facing shitcorp in a highly competitive market is in fact effective and can often work. The efficiency is somewhere between 1% to 99%, which in all scenarios objectively better than 0%.

Same with boycotting some Chinese brands for example. Sure, the defeatist argument goes that because most everything is made there we can't really boycott those wares. But who exactly set these "fair play" rules and do humans need to one-sidedly abide by them when facing corporate abuse? I can buy Chinese something and at the same time boycott Chinese something else and it is fine. I literally don't care if some megacorp would consider that "unfair" or "hypocrisy". And neither should any individual human be concerned about corporation's opinions, ever.

I would say in EA's case, boycotting them did have some level of effectiveness. They didn't stop being shitty altogether, but they did come out with a couple strong singleplayer experiences that doesn't overwhelmingly stink of overt monetization, and it seemed like they put at least some attempt into turning their reputation around (though they still put out plenty of monetization slop, particularly their sports games)

But they messed around for too long, and I don't foresee their reputation ever seriously recovering. Especially now that they have a 55B investment/purchase to make up for now, they'll probably be even more egregious.

Won't Saudi ownership of something bad make it even worse? The era goes on!

Grave danger of integer overflow (underflow?).

I'm not sure they're even the worst games company. Ubisoft would give them a run for their money but that's a $30 DLC over a $70 base price I refused to pay for.

No, EA earn every criticism and this move to PE will do absolutely nothing to improve their business practices.

Still EA. Had been boycotting them since like 2012 or so and will continue to do it. (no pirating or f2p stuff inclusive)

Palantir? Flock?

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