10 Times Publishers Sabotaged Their Own Video Games

5. Forcing Every Studio To Use Frostbite - EA

Mass Effect Andromeda
BioWare

I'm... noticing a trend here. But hey, there's a reason why EA have been voted the worst company - like, ever - a whole bunch of times. Seriously, go stick an EA logo on Star Wars' Emperor and see if it looks out of place. Go on! We do it all the time, and frankly I've never felt better.

EA's rep has flip-flopped so much over the last five years, but arguably the biggest contributor to their decade of controversies has been the company's insistence that every studio use the Frostbite engine.

When used properly, and by those familiar with its intricacies, Frostbite can look phenomenal. That's fairly evident in pretty much every game helmed by DICE, who created the engine all the way back in 2008 with Battlefield: Bad Company. But sadly for those studios less accustomed to its quirks, using Frostbite can quickly turn into a nightmare.

At the start of the decade, EA demanded that all its studios switch to Frostbite, as pretty much every studio was utilising their own separate engines. Problems quickly began to emerge, as Frostbite was mainly designed for FPS and multiplayer games. BioWare in particular found themselves repeatedly frustrated by the engine, with Dragon Age: Inquisition supposedly a nightmare to work on and both Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem experiencing widespread bugs upon their respective launches.

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WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.