Ok
???
Let's recap:
I brought up Trip Hawkins' statements to highlight how EA's culture has been rotten for a very long time. Specifically, they are one of the "OG third parties" that didn't like paying their fair share to first-party platform holders to help subsidize the creation of new customer bases.
You said EA has been a "force for good" without qualifying it any further. In response, I simply reiterated that Trip Hawkins and his attitude were a part of EA since the NES at least.
Then you said "I just demonstrated that is factually incorrect" without actually presenting any facts or counterpoints. I'd welcome any interviews or insider knowledge or alternative histories of EA where they didn't chew up and spit out franchises and companies, but you haven't done so. I'd be eager to hear it to help me add some nuance and breadth to my ~25 years of experience with EA from the perspective of a customer and an enthusiast.
Then you followed up with "The honest truth is that so much of EA's story really doesn't square with their reputation if you actually bother to look into it", which is a polite way of poisoning the well instead of engaging with the discussion.
So it sounds like you are very fond of your narrative, which is why I called it a narrative (a false one at that). This doesn't demonstrate EA to be a "force of good" nor does it erase their behavior and their public statements from that period of time. Again, if you have any interviews or insider knowledge or alternative histories, present them. I couldn't stop you even if I tried.
I'm not blowing you off. Rather, I'm not taking what you say as gospel just because you continue to insist "I lived that shit. I lived it. That was my life". Great. If that grants you knowledge of things that contradict what I've said, please feel free to present that at any time.
Do you believe that being "in" during that period of time somehow changes EA's behavior and the end-user experience with their products? I'm not casting individual judgment on every individual EA employee or every single EA product. EA has made a handful of my favorite games of all time. I'm making a broad-brush judgment on their behavior as a bloated third-party company that has been especially greedy and cutthroat for as long as I can remember. For some reason, you take this personally, as if working for EA makes you guilty of their behavior. That's not what I'm claiming. And to take that further, I don't see how knowing people and working with people during that time period makes EA innocent of what I'm claiming (unless you have some special insight into why they acted the way they did).
Ok, i dont have time to go point-by-point, although as I mentioned reading the appropriate wikipedia pages will all back this up, so lets just focus on your entry point talking about Trip Hawkins' comments about EA vs the console scene circa 1990. Which essentially describes them basically cracking the protection on Sega's carts and use it to negotiate a better deal for themselves.
First of all this is completely consumer agnostic. Its also a remarkably similar situation to the breaking of protection on Atari VCS carts which led to the birth of Activision in 1982.
Bear in mind the defection of Atari coders to form Activision was due to the way they were being treated like shit by their current employer, a feeling that was clearly on Trip Hawkins' mind when he founded EA and instituted the "album" style packaging that gave prominence to the creators of the product rather than just the corporate parent.
So essentially we have a throughline here from the literal birth of third-party console development, the elevation of game creatives to that of artists as opposed to Ray Kassar's infamous "Towel designers" valuation of his coders. (and people wonder why Atari went tits up... sheesh) through to the eventual usurpation of the home computer market by the Japanese behemoths.
This is a big deal in the context of the times. Remember we are going from a period where machines like the Amiga and Atari ST had ,more or less democratized game publishing by basically allowing access to anyone with the funds to get run of discs and appropriate packaging churned out.
There was a lot of resistance to Sega and Nintendo's business model not due to protectionism, but down to the fact that publishing for it required fixed runs of cartridges to be produced at substantial cost. Smaller players literally couldn't afford to take the risk of the up-front spend, and past that point everyone had to deal with the console platform holders taking a chunk out of each copy sold for licensing.
Bear in mind at this time there is zero back-end platform infrastructure for those license fees to fund. Its a straight up tax, for nothing. In fact its presence was mainly there to control the flow of titles onto the platform.
You see, in the aftermath of Activision managing to get third-party publishing going on the VCS, the floodgates opened and chancers like Mystique were putting out dodgy titles like Custer's Revenge. This loss of control was perceived to play a large role in Atari's downfall, and neither Nintendo nor Sega had any intention of falling into that trap.
The point is, EA were not the bad guys in doing this. The rise of the Japanese console market was enormously disruptive and destructive to third-party development. What was once an open-market was rapidly turning into a closed shop due to the economic ramifications of console licensing. EA getting themselves a good deal was a legitimate act of self-preservation, the people you should feel sorry for are those without the wherewithal to engineer themselves a decent deal.
You need to understand how high the risk was for smaller publishers. For example, Psygnosis basically were financial crippled in the mid-90's when their attempts to break into the console market with titles like Wiz'n'Liz and Puggsy crashed and burned. laying the foundation for Sony to swoop in and purchase them.
But this is by the by. The thesis I felt you were presenting was that EA was evil "from the start". And I rebutted that by pointing out that under Trip Hawkins tenure (82-90, in a lesser capacity 90-94) there's very little if anything to find fault with. You mention Origin systems, a company EA aquired in 1992 at a time when Hawkins already had a foot out the door with his 3D0 venture and hadn't been CEO for over 2 years.
What his legacy mainly was stuff Dpaint, the IFF format, and so on, reasonably priced packages and technologies that were the bread and butter of countless 16-bit era productions in the US and Europe.
The "bad stuff", starts to phase in around the late 90's. A point at which under Larry Probst's leadership the company is really starting to be shaped around its high-selling sports franchises.
I'd just add that if you're looking to show how terrible EA have always been, it'd be helpful to have a comparative example of a big publisher around for the same length of time who did things "right". I mean if you can't provide examples showing how someone else did it better, maybe the result was inevitable. The industry back then was enormously volatile, and the landscape was reshaped drastically many times over.
