I know that it may be unlikely, but I do hope that this affects their bottom line. EA is a toxic company inside and out.
1993 EA has nothing to do with EA from 1996 onwards...
EA screwed Origin (that then they already owned, just read stuff about development of Ultima 8 and 9... there are lots of documents about how executive meddling made U8 a meh game, and U9 a totally ruined game), then bought and ruined Westwood, and so on.
Also as the time passed they got more and more problems with employees. Then we had crazy shit, like when EA closed a studio in LA, and people found out that the studio had more middle managers than grunts, and this is why the studio could not decide what to do, it simply had so much people giving orders and so few people doing, that doing stuff was impossible.
The EA that wrote this: http://chrishecker.com/Can_a_Computer_Make_You_Cry%3F doesn't exist anymore.
But their games back then start to suffer from lots of executive meddling, with EA interfering more and more on the artistry of their game authors.
My best guess it is related to the launch of Playstation in late 1995, spurring a race for 3D games and FMV games, requiring much more money than before, and thus requiring more "risk management."
There's your problem. At some point EA started buying up studios to take the IP and fire the employees. Then they went on a micro purchase bender and got rid of any idea of respecting the customer.
That will effectively make business impossible for them if even 0.1% of buyers do this, and it doesn't cost any customer anything.
Plus the banks have incentive to side with the customer, not EA. EA absolutely needs them, but customers can easily run to a different bank.
If you try this with Steam, they flag you for fraud and shut down your without recourse. All previously bought games are lost.
If you try this with Amazon, they flag you for fraud and shut down your account without recourse. Your previously bought e-books are automatically deleted from all your devices.
I certainly don't like EA's DRM practices and some of their other practices, but now that I'm another day into the future, I could easily see this happening to any company as well-used as them.
Addendum: Startups that claim they don't/wouldn't have these sorts of problems are probably because their load comes slowly, steadily, and these problems are caught early, or refactored out for efficiency, and the developers miss the potentially catastrophic results. When you get hit by a LOAD of traffic all at once, or other similar thing, bad things happen.
See: Diablo 3, Starcraft 2, Half Life 2: Deathmatch
The cost of Sim City is literally half an hour of consultancy work. This means the lawsuit would cost me more than I could hope to gain from it, and I would only be doing it to spite the publisher.
If that is my goal, it is a more efficient use of my time to accept the sunken cost, give some negative reviews, and badmouth the publisher.
Think about it.