EA is panicking...

Kind: captions Language: en EA has been massacring the games you paid for. They've been on a corporate slaughter, deleting the still active online servers for dozens of your favorite titles. But this isn't anything new for the gaming industry as a whole. Ever since the gaming igopoly saw the gold in the live service hills, they have stopped selling and started leasing them to you. EA is rubbing a dark truth in your face. You don't actually own anything you buy from them. Everything comes with strings attached. But gamers have found a hill they're willing to die on. A massive digital war has erupted, and it's all about to change the gaming industry forever. The battleground that turned the tide against EA was College Football 27. For millions of fans, it was one of the most highly anticipated titles of 2026. [music] It was a chance to escape the broken corporate shell that the Madden series had become. The moment the game launched, the honeymoon period was well and truly over. EA did what EA does best. They flooded the game with microtransactions. It's one of the most hated tactics in gaming, and it's gotten even worse after the live service boom, selling a full game to you peace meal transaction by transaction. While microtransactions are a plague for the whole industry, few companies have embraced them quite as much as EA. Their Dungeon Keeper remake got you to pay to reduce build times in game. They effectively made the player experience worse just to squeeze a little more money out of you to make it feel convenient. Dead Space 3. EA's entry into the previously acclaimed survival horror series gave players the ability to buy weapon upgrade parts with real money. [music] That is despite the scarcity of these parts being a core element of what makes a game a survival horror. The EA loot box fiasco for 2017 Star Wars Battlefront 2 actually resulted in EA winning a Guinness World Record for most downvoted Reddit comment of all time when a fan criticized the company's greed in a Reddit thread for not even being able to play Darth Vader in a game without engaging in loot boxes. They gave the widely mocked response, "The [music] intent is to provide players with a sense of pride and accomplishment for unlocking different heroes. We'll be making constant adjustments to ensure that players have challenges that are compelling, rewarding, [music] and of course, attainable via gameplay. We appreciate the candid feedback. For their trouble here, they received a karma score of almost minus 668,000, which means they likely received even more than that in terms of actual down votes. The consequences weren't just social either. EA felt the pain when their stock price dropped 8.5% [music] and they reversed course. Probably the most infamous and profitable of all of EA's loot boxes is the FIFA Ultimate Team packs. This is a shady gambling mechanic widely known as a Skinner box that lets players spend real money for the chance to unlock highlevel players for their teams. According to previous EA financial disclosures, the annual revenue from the Ultimate Team packs is over a billion dollar with the revenue from those loot boxes ultimately outpacing the revenue from selling the actual base game. So, why not try to replicate that monetary magic in College Football 27, released for a base price of $69.99, the game's two most popular modes are Dynasty and Road to Glory, with Dynasty being the mode that allows you to design and manage the future of your team. Road to Glory allows you to create and customize a single player and his career. Both are single player modes, and in College Football 27, both come chock full of microtransactions. To quote another famous video game franchise, "Everyone disliked that. It wouldn't even be the first time EA got flamed." Back in 2013, they set an awful precedent when their reboot of Max's classic Sim City was only playable with an internet connection, kickstarting the always online DRM trend. It was so poorly received, it meant death for the entire franchise. They upset fans again in 2015 when they did the same to Need for Speed. Would history repeat itself again? Things had already started off well for EA in the pre-release period of early July. Former college football player Matt Cybert publicly said, "My first game in # CFB27 Dynasty was absolute cinema." Early Steam reviews also followed a positive trend with one player writing, "The gameplay feels deeper, smarter, and more rewarding than ever." The honeymoon period ended on July 6th when whispers of a mass backlash against EA introducing single player microtransactions started to grow across various social media platforms. On July 7th, Bordeaux got involved. James Bordeaux is a 23-year-old YouTuber from Kentucky. He's also a former EA partner who makes his living playing and creating content around EA sports games, which has earned him almost 600,000 YouTube subscribers. He was even given an early sampler of the game for promotional purposes and had even been invited to the Rose Bowl for a promotional photo shoot. If any kind of person would be incentivized to paint EA's actions in the best possible light, it would be James Bordeaux. Except that is not what happened. Bordeaux released his opening shot against his partner company when he tweeted, "Sneaking microtransactions into single player mode lets me know where EA wants to take both football titles in the future. Taking the game in that direction is going to ruin all of the support and love you have built from [music] this community. Do what's right. This same tweet started the hashtag # CFPplay don't pay. That would soon become the rallying cry for everyone joining the movement criticizing EA's business decisions here. In the process, it seemed that Bordeaux had torched his lucrative arrangement with EA, but started something bigger. Reviews for the game began to tank across the board. And other EA affiliated content creators joined Bordeaux's rebellion. Mainstream news sources began to take notice and write articles about the grassroots proconsumer movement that was unfolding against EA. Soon, the big shots were starting to feel the heat. But would any of this actually succeed in getting EA to reverse course? Bordeaux himself was not optimistic. In an interview with Fox News, he said, "Take out microtransactions completely. Bring back all of the features that they removed. If they really took that stance, I'm okay again. But I don't believe they will. Miracles have happened before. Could they happen again? 2026 has been an eventful year for EA already for all the wrong reasons. In August, it was taken private after 36 years on the open stock market thanks to $55 billion posted by a consortium formed of Silverlake, Affinity, and the PIF. That last one is the public investment fund, the private piggy bank of the fund's chairman, Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman or MBS with around $900 billion to play with. This same fund has also bought considerable shares in Capcom, Nintendo, Take 2 Interactive and Nexon to name just a few. The buying spree has sparked a huge concern across gaming media since private ownership will make EA even less accountable to its consumer base. And given how little EA already seems to care about them, the thought of this relationship getting even worse is a little terrifying. When you look deeper into even EA's recent history, you can see why their corporate overlords might see private as a better deal than remaining public, especially considering that the company's business conduct has led them to getting sued by their own shareholders multiple times. Take Battlefield 4, which released broken and buggy thanks to crunch policies instituted from the top down. Two different lawsuits popped up after the game's release, both claiming that the company had misled shareholders about the game's quality. Private ownership at least eliminates some of those concerns. The leveraged buyout of EA from $18 billion debt with 1.8 billion in yearly interest also means the company will have to move mountains to justify its existence to its new corporate masters. It will inevitably lead to sweeping employee cuts in the short term to reduce overhead. In EA's corporate jargon, the mass firing scheme will cut $170 million in annual costs through organizational efficiencies, a standard euphemism for layoffs. It also has got gaming audiences worried that the quality of the games themselves will suffer, especially as the Saudi government has dubbed 2026 the year of AI with plans to implement generative AI across the board. This would likely include assets for video games produced by Saudi controlled companies. In other words, it's looking bleak for anyone who enjoys EA games and wants a fair deal out of buying one. The gamer backlash terrified EA and it reminded people about what the company was really like. A living nightmare. In 2012 and 2013, EA won the Consumerrist Award for worst company in America, beating out AT&T, Walmart, and Bank of America. And they have seemingly gone out of their way to really earn it. When EA isn't shutting down games, it's going even bigger and murdering entire studios. Its particular technique, especially in the 2000s, was getting its claws into smaller studios that had made hits just to strip their intellectual property. That was usually followed by mass layoffs and corporate restructuring that left the developers who actually made those games great, in the dust. They were so bad for this that others working in the gaming industry, sometimes referred to them as the evil empire. Some of the victims of their predatory tactics here included Bullfrog Productions, who made games like Populus, Theme Park, and Dungeon Keeper before being shut down by EA in 2001. Westwood [music] Studios, creators of the popular Command and Conquer series, were liquidated by EA in 2003. And of course, Origin Systems, creators of the Ultima franchise. They were shuttered by EA in 2004 after being forced by the publisher to make some of Ultima's least beloved entries. EA would like you to believe that their pillaging days are long behind them in the early 2000s, but they did this exact same thing to Visceral Games, creators of the Dead Space franchise in 2017. They even tried to brute force take over Ubisoft through aggressive share accumulations before backing down in 2010. EA's shady behavior even extends to their advertising practices to drum up fake controversy and hype for Dante's Inferno. Back in 2010, they hired actors to pretend to be fundamentalist Christian protesters outside of E3. And for 2015 Star Wars Battlefront, EA secretly offered advanced copies of the game for Reddit moderators in exchange for them suppressing any negative comments about the game. This backfired when that scheme was exposed to the public. Sometimes gaming companies can seem so greedy and cruel, it makes you wonder if they actually hate their player base. The whole central contention of the stop killing games campaign is that if a company no longer wants to put money into a game servers, they should release the source code. That way, gamers can make their own private servers and continue to enjoy the experience that they paid for on release day. But gaming companies like EA have a financial incentive to fight tooth and nail against that too. Self- cannibalization. Obviously, it goes without saying that video games are a highly competitive industry where every major company is scrambling to keep their edge at all costs. The Battlefield franchise, published by EA, which as of this video's production, has a dozen standalone games and had made an astonishing 88.7 million sales by 2022. The main competitor for the Battlefield series [music] would be Activision's Call of Duty franchise. It is a marketing juggernaut that sweeps Battlefield aside as America's most financially successful gaming franchise of all time, selling over 500 million copies by 2023. So, with all of the competition, the last thing EA wants is Battlefield facing competition against earlier Battlefield installments. In the eyes of EA, if a player enjoys a previous entry in the franchise without paying a subscription fee or investing in microtransactions, that is money left on the table. If EA could just shut down the Call of Duty servers so you would play Battlefield instead, they would. But they can't. However, that is exactly the power they have when it comes to earlier installments of their own games. Even if they lose a few loyal players in the process, they already have that player's money, so what does it matter to them? Same goes for microtransactions. They're happy to take that PR hit in exchange for the revenue. Even that is nothing compared to the cash that live service rakes in. In the first quarter of 2018, EA made $787 million from live service games and only $260 million from full game sales. Then CEO Andrew Wilson, who was literally the inspiration for the villain in EA's own Mirror's Edge 2, said in an investor call, "Live services that include optional digital monetization provide a very important element of choice that can extend and enhance the experience in our games." Consumers disagree, but that has never mattered much to them and even less under ownership of a private consortium, which is why what happened with College Football 27 was so extraordinary. In early July 2026, the fan backlash and the boycott campaigns rattled EA's resolve for College Football 27 microtransactions. The game was only released on July 2nd for Deluxe Edition buyers. In less than a week, the campaign caused a true gaming giant to backpedal on one of its favorite shady corporate tactics. In EA's official response, they said, "In College Football 27, we aspired to deliver the deepest experience to date. However, your feedback is that we've missed the mark with the introduction of paid progression options. What you've said is that they're not adding the value we intended." Gamers rejoiced, but few were happier than Bordeaux himself, who posted a video simply entitled, "We won." He later amended it to, "We won, but only a little because EA is EA." And that's because despite getting EA to part with its beloved microtransactions in the Dynasty and Road to Glory modes, they still refused to reinstate some single player features from the earlier games. So, the fight continues. Even if the war isn't over, there is something to be proud of in the consumers at least mostly winning this battle. The gaming industry is a mess of greedy corporate interests. But what happened with College Football 27 might just be a ray of hope for the consumer. When passionate gaming communities work together with influencers in those very same communities, even corporate giants are forced to shut up and listen to their demands. Want to know more of the awful things going on at EA? Then check out why EA is terrified to release a new Sims game or watch this instead.