No doubt.
IMHO Problem when any company goes public is #1 priority is short term profits to keep the shareholders happy.
and the hart of the company dies, with it the creative types who don't want to keep churning out basically the same safe product for years on end.

Blizzard, EA, Rockstar, etc. They no longer have anything in common with the company they were 20 years ago apart from the name.
But hey, that's just business, and another company will take the place once the current ones are blead dry.

I haven't really cared about anything EA have put out in the past 10 or so years. When they made Origin mandatory for their games I ditched them and haven't felt like I lost anything. The quality of their games had been rapidly dropping by then. What were good were already released by then and there long running franchises were on a steep decline. To me the NFS franchise ended with Hot Pursuit 2010, Medal of Honor with Airborne, Battlefield with Bad Company 2, Dead Space with DS2, Command & Conquer with 3: Tiberium Wars, Sim City with 4: Rush Hour, The Sims with 2, Dragon Age is one game with an expansion, no sequels, Mass Effect is a trilogy and I was never too much into sports games. I appreciated them for saving Brütal Legend when Activision wanted to axe it, I appreciated they gave a chance to Alice: Madness Returns.

But all these were long ago and they lost all my good will. I don't think the Saudi government buying them will majorly improve them and I don't care about EA, but I find it a little concerning how the west is losing a lot of its soft power through Chinese and Middle-Eastern buyouts.

RandomStranger wrote on 2025-10-04, 09:33:

I haven't really cared about anything EA have put out in the past 10 or so years. When they made Origin mandatory for their games I ditched them and haven't felt like I lost anything.

Same for me.

And when I did buy the odd EA title once in a blue moon, it was on console, so I didn't have to deal with their online DRM crap.

I was surprised how much effort was put into the C&C Remastered collection, my only game purchase in the last 10+ years from one of the big companies.
I know it was a joint effort, but the fact EA even calibrated with other people rather then yet another minimal effort to get working on current OS's much like their XP releases and leave it to the community to tidy up.

Was also surprised it was EA that got it right and it was Blizzard and Rockstar's Remasters that got it wrong.

I really hope there are folks writing platform-agnostic CLI tools to handle and create MIX/SHP/AUD/VQA/W3D files for non-blood money'd versions of something that uses them!!!