10 Times EA Screwed The Pooch

Perhaps the most infamous bad practice of Electronic Arts has to be the ways in which they've mishandled the various other companies they've bought over the years.

For a long time, the common reasons EA would acquire other developers appeared to be in order to strip them of useful IPs and squash any competition. We've already discussed this in the case of Origins Studios, but they are by no means the only studio to have seen this treatment - simply the first.

Maxis, Bullfrog Productions, Westwood Studios, Black Box Games, PlayFish... the list of studios basically stripped for parts and then all fired or amalgamated is a long and painful one.

And it's unclear if this issue does appear to have been addressed. On one hand, in 2008 the new EA CEO referred to the fact that these prior practices had been unjust and appeared to care about these mistakes not being repeated. On the other, the closure of Visceral Games in 2017 has made many suspicious that the company is back to old tricks - and we can only watch to see if this is the case.