An anonymous EA employee's letter regarding Sim City

The biggest fallout for EA will be difficulty attracting and maintaining quality staff. If you keep making games people love, you can ignore a lot of the hardcore gaming community criticism over DRM and survive, or even thrive. (I dislike a lot of Apple's business practices, but still give them a boatload of money for their superior products).

But people don't want to be embarrassed by the company they work for, and the best people who can leave do leave - and it becomes hard to replace them with top level people. (Many of whom will never work for EA due to it's reputation) Eventually, your game quality declines, folks stop buying your games not because you are an "evil" company, but because you now make terrible games.

If EA top brass has any sense, this is what they will understand and act on. The real danger is in the insidious impact it has on EA employees, and what this does to everything else over time.