Can you boycott Palantir? Well, no. Not really. No regular citizen can (to any definition of getting a result). It's like 100% ineffective. But boycotting a much small, consumer facing shitcorp in a highly competitive market is in fact effective and can often work. The efficiency is somewhere between 1% to 99%, which in all scenarios objectively better than 0%.
Same with boycotting some Chinese brands for example. Sure, the defeatist argument goes that because most everything is made there we can't really boycott those wares. But who exactly set these "fair play" rules and do humans need to one-sidedly abide by them when facing corporate abuse? I can buy Chinese something and at the same time boycott Chinese something else and it is fine. I literally don't care if some megacorp would consider that "unfair" or "hypocrisy". And neither should any individual human be concerned about corporation's opinions, ever.
No, EA earn every criticism and this move to PE will do absolutely nothing to improve their business practices.
If anything, now you can say that EA is doubly the worst company, especially in gaming.
Buying EA for influence? With the reputation EA has in gaming? They're a joke - they're not influencing anything. Its like buying a violin to fix a flat tire.
Starting the propaganda for a ground invasion. I wonder if this one one of the crowd-sourced ideas submitted to the DoD?
Turns out the notion that they wouldn’t need humans to make games and they would use AI for most things was a pipe dream and firing staff to be profitable with the huge loan didn't work.
Now they are fucked.
Every company that spends money to buy up companies died and goes defunct because they keep failing to realize that they have to keep spending loads of money to make money and it doesn’t just roll in after acquiring IPs. Not even mobile slop or live service can save them anymore.
You want to buy a company? Bring your own fucking money. Why do we have to pay for this shit?
There’s a whole world of gaming out there.
Is the Trump family just going to own all of our entertainment and military companies?
Are we the Bad Guys?
Not any more. Now we're the Worse Guys.
But they messed around for too long, and I don't foresee their reputation ever seriously recovering. Especially now that they have a 55B investment/purchase to make up for now, they'll probably be even more egregious.
Want better games? Find them. Support the smaller studios and indie devs that produce quality, or contribute to a FOSS one.
Do you think your average EA Sports FC or Battlefield player is even aware of that reputation? These games still sell tens of million of copies. Positive influence in Battlefield alone would be huge.
They are known for making games that sell to a mass audience and monetizing them well.
It's like calling McDonald's a joke. It doesn't take away that they are a successful business affecting many people in the world.
Fabulously greedy FIFA seems to have realized this and is no longer partnering with them.
If you want influence, there are waaay better value propositions.
That being said, influencing happens by mere exposure. There was a time, when Europeans bought up the kit of a bad mexican football club, just because the jersey was hyped on fifa 14. so if someone is trying to influence them, it will happen.
Sports games sell like hotcakes and have people buy them every year religiously but you never hear about them, sims too. Their other titles were heavy hitters.
Their just a seperate audience; EA certainly has influence, just not with people that talk about games.
Are you going to have MAGA Madden?
The Socialist League?
If product placement didn't work it wouldn't be an industry
I'll bet they lost a lot of money - I'm sure there's an interesting story about FIFA's efforts to get their own game development up and running. I guess they wanted EA to pay $300 million per year and EA said no, but I doubt FIFA made 50 million on the games they released.
If anything, FIFA was probably getting an incredible deal from EA given the cost of making AAA games today.