While EA recently dodged the bullet in once again becoming the “Worst Company in America,” that doesn’t mean that everyone in the industry is exactly falling in love with them all over again.
Lorne Lanning (of Oddworld) recently went on a profanity laced tirade, taking the company to task for shipping Battlefield 4 in, shall we say, a “less than adequate” condition (due to its many glitches and bugs). “”F**k that business. I don’t want to play with that business, because it was a losing business…Why did they Battlefield 4 ship? You know that team was crying. You know that team knew that game wasn’t ready to go. You know that team f**king spent a lot of sleepless nights building that sh** out to look as good and play as good, when it was able to be experienced, being played as they were intending it to be played. Someone made a decision that the shareholders are more important than the customer. And we see a lot of that. How do you blow that? How do you take that f**king jewel and ship it with dirt all over it?” he said angrily.
Lanning also feels that, due to the driving financial forces behind game companies today, developers like EA can lose sight of what it means to create a truly innovative title. He says gamers should be given higher priority, stating that “I’d rather not make games than go f**king be a slave for public companies who care more about their shareholders than they do about their customers.”
For more on EA’s struggles in 2014, be sure to check out this article .