Morp said:
EA? QUALITY STANDARDS!? HAHAHAHAHAHA!

EA is notorious for releasing games WELL before their maturity point, with some of the shortest bug and beta testing lengths of ANY publisher. SimCity4 was a nightmare: The game was released long before they added support for common soundcards (only soundblasters were supported, not AC97/Realtek onboard, which over 80% of people now use) and specifically they do not support motherboards with VIA chipsets. (That's chipset, not CPUs.) Selectively, due to being lazy, they cut out technical support for approximately 87% of the entire world, before they even buy the damn game.

EA is also notorious for overworking and underpaying their design teams, setting unrealistically high requirements, and failing to meet investors' demands.

Finally, EA is a notorious micro-manager, even going so far as to fire the design team heads who >came up with the damn game< and replacing them with designers who've never even worked on the same genre.

EA is the game publisher equivalent of 1980's Atari. You turn to them when you can't do better.

They did ok when they inherited the C&C franchise. Up until C&C4 that is.