So you won't pay them, great, you will just hype up the game by increasing its numbers, supply servers with people etc. F2p games are the most profitable ones on the market even though big chunk of players is not paying a damn dime, does not mean they do not contribute.
Independence? from EA? I am sorry, look at what happened to Blizzard after Activision+Blizzard merge... I mean, seriously. "Oh great, they will have more money to produce games", "Oh its fine, Activision will just take care of marketing" that is what the naive ones were saying back then and You sound just like them right now.
EA/Activision DOES NOT CARE about the product and its quality, they care about the money. They will not leave gaming studio to do what it does best, they will enforce what they can to increase profits. Activision managed to destroy Blizzard, a company that for years was considered the best game development studio in the world. From being a leader in every genre they touched, they degraded to following others and losing their jobs in droves.
But you belive that EA (which is literally the same thing as Activision, just different name) will leave Respawn to do their own thing, keep dreaming...
You are not seeing a problem, exactly. Ea kicked itself in the gutter, they shown what POS company they actually are, they pissed off their investors, they destroyed their public relations, they even went on to fight the government to protect their gambling garbage. Their stock plummeted and just one or more 2 things had to go right and gaming industry would be free of them and then there would just be Activision left to get rid of. But then as i said, 50 mil morons went on to save EA from the gutter... then ofc the same people will complain how EA/Activision is bad and should go away and be outraged when EA/Activision wants to sell them a red dot for 5$.
Normally wouldn't care, people can't be saved from their own stupidity, but it's just sad that such morons are causing great gaming studios to die cause they decided to support a rotten publisher and hence hurt entire gaming community.
You're going way out of context with what I said. I said: there is a
chance. And its not a likely one. I even spoke of miracles.
We don't disagree about EA as a publisher don't get me wrong. But I play games to game, and not to be making public statements about my lifestyle choices all the time. Moreover, my focus in gaming is on quality. There are loads of EA releases that I avoid very consciously: Anthem, Battlefield ever since 4 onwards, etc.
What you don't seem to get is that you can make noise by avoiding everything, but you can also make noise by
only investing time and effort in the titles that are of good quality. That only improves the chances of said publisher to make more of the same level of quality. Proof of that is within, for example, the growth of indie gaming. Some early attempts were handsomely rewarded by gamers and seemingly dead game genres got revived, just by sheer power of popularity. This whole Battle Royale thing, is another such example. Our voice matters, so let's keep that dialogue.
Also, more on that indie movement: studio's may be killed by EA, but the talents just pop up elsewhere, free of EA and start doing what they wanted to do anyway. Its not like EA commits mass murder on developers.
Your idea that the gaming industry 'would be free of them soon' is about as realistic as the 'boycot' on a recent Metro game. Completely bonkers and clearly out of touch with reality. We're looking at the number one game publisher on this planet, perhaps only beaten by the likes of Tencent in size, wealth and therefore budget to make games. If you care about gaming, you'd care more about sending EA the right message rather than a complete boycot that will never succeed anyway. Call it pragmatic, if you will.
The REAL movement with EA is that they just find new markets to sell games in, most notably mobile / f2p with in-app purchases seem to do well. At the same time they still own lots of developers with lots of talent, despite the brain drain of all those studios that got closed. Success stories like Apex Legends are likely to turn heads and keep EA focused on more than just a mobile / casual platform. That, in the end, benefits all gaming on the PC/console platforms. There is more competition that way and competition leads to better content, within or outside of EA's releases. The crucial question you need to be asking yourself is: do you prefer all that talent and funding to go to the mobile platform, allowing it to gain traction faster, and moving playerbase away from the platforms you prefer?
Bottom line, my stance is: hate the game, not the publisher. What I want is more funding to games we prefer to see. A boycot on a publisher will never be the right path for that - its called biting the hand that feeds. Not in the case of 4A/Tencent/Metro and not here. Better off boycotting the individual games on personal preference - its also a good way not to waste money.
In the end I'm not
losing anything by playing a free game, and I'm also not helping EA"s bottom line. In the end, their yearly reports don't contain player counts but revenue streams and profit numbers. I'm not contributing to those, quite the opposite -
my login costs them money. And at the same time, I'm rewarding a quality release. That's a win-win situation, contrary to what you think.
