User blog comment:Th3 razor/Electronic Arts voted 'Worst American Company' by Consumerist readers/@comment-1441235-20120407031127/@comment-28584497-20120407063646

"Retailers selling used games"

That's the whole problem right there. I'm fairly certain retailers aren't supposed to be selling used games at all.

"Nobody was lopping off access to half their game"

Oh? Nah, they were just lopping off access to the WHOLE game back in my day, apparently. DRM and registration codes sound familiar at all to you? Same. Exact. Concept. And it's been in existence since 2000, at least. Probably longer, and I just don't remember it. And anyway, you don't have to buy the damn thing if you buy the game new. You get one for free and save what, 15$? IMHO if someone's too cheap to spend an extra 5$ on a relatively new game, they deserve to get shafted like that.

"EA as a company is a leech that sucks the creativity and originality out of almost every developer they've acquired. "

That logic could be applied to any company on earth. DICE acquired what would eventually become Kaos studios, used it for one game, and then laid them off. Activision does that with IW and Treyarch, and used to do so with the companies that made their other games before they got laid off and their franchises scrapped. Herve and Eric Caen are dickweeds who destroyed Fallout. some might say Bethesda does the same with id Tech and whatnot. I'm sure Microsoft and Google and whatnot all have some disgusting secrets under their carpets, so to speak.

"Finally, having respect for the developers is wholly different from accepting whatever trash they happen to deign to throw to the masses. "

Underlined the exact issue. Calling their product "trash". I'm sure they would disagree. I'd LOVE to see you do better, with or without their budget or materials. I get so tired of people feeling so entitled that they believe they can criticize a developer. The fact is that technology progresses and it gets a lot harder for someone to keep up. People have to deal with more complex technical assets (engines etc.), create more refined art (notice that nobody has made a game that looks like a retro game in years without the express intention of capturing that feel), all while trying to maintain the same level of quality as was acceptable in previous years. Ever notice how most car manufacturing is done by automatons instead of people nowadays? Machines are more predictable and therefore good at performing the same task, regardless of complexity, over and over. It's the same deal, except it's not really possible to automate videogame programming, story-writing, and graphics/art-production.

And the kool-aid comment... really? That's something I'd expect from the CNN.com community.