Do Companies like EA Purposely make their games bad?

[Badpaladin]

Speak for yourself, but I found the latest Madden game absolutely awesome. Franchise Mode in particular was great, especially with the ownership simulations turned off.

As far as EA goes, it's just a popular fad to hate them because they're a large distributor and can easily be blamed for any number of issues (many of which may not even be related to them).

[notorious98]

Since I don't work for EA, I can't say for certain. About 5 weeks ago, the prevailing theory, and one I came up with before I read it all over the net as well, was that the game was, for whatever reason deliberately not made as well as it could have been. In fact the game was sooooooo bad (Swtor), I almost convinced myself it was a mass psychology experiment, or maybe even the CIA or some such agency came in and demanded the game be the worst piece of crap ever sold to mankind. I mean the game was bad, no HORRIBLE on every conceivable level, in some cases the worse implementation of an idea or MMO aspect I had ever seen, except the area loot idea, which was balls out the best new thing I had encountered in Swtor.

Swtor, when released was a 5 on a scale of 1-100.

Bad troll is bad.

As for EA Sports games like Madden, there's no reason to change it when the mass psychology behind the game is "Snap, run to the side, launch 50 yard pass, score TDs." Personally, I love to run the ball (haven't played Madden since '09), but get trashed for doing so. The game is a terrible rendition of real football. It's arcade style football (almost NFL Blitz) with full NFL rosters. It's purely the rosters that sell the game, not the game itself.

[Vespian]

I used to work for EA. I spent time in several roles while I was with them: tester, test engineer and software engineer.

As a software engineer I worked on a project that had over 100 people on the team. I was amazed at how much money was going into such a terrible product. You have to be careful about what you say since anything negative about the product some people will take personally. Out of all the people on the project, there were only about two people who could make decisions of consequence, and those two people made some pretty terrible decisions in my opinion. Everyone else is just doing what they are told... or else. The game was a successful franchise that EA had purchased and destroyed, a typical pattern. There was terrible gameplay, meaningless stats (ie it would say level up, some bars would move, but it actually had 0 impact on gameplay). They also spent millions of dollars getting actors for terrible cutscenes. I could go on for some length.

Sounds like Command and Conquer. Those cutscenes kept getting more and more horrible. They used to be B-movie, but they managed to pull it way down below C level. At one point, they had half the cast from Battle Star Galactica and the cutscenes still failed, so I imagine it's their art director that needs his balls cut off.