10 Times EA Screwed The Pooch

If a video game developer or publisher is famous amongst the community, it means one of two things; they've either done something really great, or something really, really awful.

As should be surprising to approximately nobody who's been keeping up with them, EA - or Electronic Arts, if you wanna get fancy - are decidedly in the "awful dealings" category. Though it's not exactly new for a games company to do something sketchy, EA have sort of gone above and beyond in terms of doing weird, bad, and illegal things - and then doing them again a year later.

If you were playing "dodgy developer bingo", you've won a good few times over.

EA have been sued by their own workers. They've been sued for literally breaking the law - more than once. They even received a Guinness World Record for the single most disliked comment ever on Reddit, when they tried to defend their pay-to-win mechanics in Star Wars Battlefront 2 by saying that "the intent is to provide players with a sense of pride and accomplishment".

In short, EA have a shopping list of misdeeds long enough to write a decent length book about them - so the real question lies in which were the worst.

Since EA's issues largely revolve around sketchy game development practices, it's often easy to forget that they've also had problems in game selling, through their online store Origins.

One of the most pressing matters came in regards to the link between EA forums and the Origins store. While it was totally fair that people could be banned from any forums for various reasons, these bans came with a decidedly unfair side effect: you would then be unable to use any of the games you had bought, for as long as you were banned from the forum.

The most concerning thing about this is that, when it initially came to light this was happening, EA eventually apologised and informed the unfortunate individual that this had been a mistake, and that they'd take measures to make sure it didn't happen in the future.

But did they actually? Of course not! Months later, another such case came to light, where someone was permanently banned access from their games for using the word "e-peen" in the forums. So it's not as though you had to say something really awful to get your stuff taken from you.