EA - How Far Will Gamers Allow Them to Go?
Wow, I have never seen one company screw up so many times in one day, where oh where to begin.. lets start off small. First we have the “Bullshotted” screenshot Joystiq was able to point out. The term from Penny Arcade refers to a ‘bullshit photoshop’ of a screen made by the company themselves, below is a screen from NBA Live ‘08 from Gamespot, click to enlarge and take note of the player all the way to the left:
Pretty sad isn’t it. Something so basic, really, insulting our intelligence almost as though people wouldn’t notice, I can’t believe a company so large would be able to let something like that slip. That is just the start of their slipping however, as seen in the video below put out by gamer “PSYK0MANT1S,” bugs are definitely let through until the final build of their newest big thing, Madden ‘08. (Warning: there is tad bit of foul language used, so make sure to put the ear muffs on the kids if they are in the room)
Again, somethings that just seems so basic. I don’t code game, but I am well aware that they do hire game testers still, but whatever, right? People still purchase their games, it is very much like said on XBL Radio, episode 50 specifically, EA is like dating a hot chick, you just let her get away with a little bit more than other chicks you’d date, because EA screwing up or screwing over us is nothing new, but for the most part, they know how to put out a pretty solid title (again though, with screw ups a good amount of the time). How low can they go though? Oh, pretty low. Shacknews has done some pretty interesting snooping using some tools found in a Wired article. It seems that EA has re-wrote history itself.
First, all references to Trip Hawkins were removed completely from both the section of “Key People” as well as taking out that he was the founder of EA. Later, you can see here, this is where the history literally was rewritten to exclude Trip, all coming from EA’s IP address. Another very amusing, yet very sad line was removed, “The company has also been the subject of criticism, most notably for its business tactics and its employment policy.” Other changes to the page have since been stopped by the Wikipedia community ensuring that Wikipedia stays as true as it can without EA trying to revise it’s own page. I now feel my earlier pox and banning on 2KSports games should be extended to EA, but are they just too big where the hardcore gamers who know of all this information won’t make a difference?
