Electronic Arts, a Publicly traded company HQ'd om Redwood City, California. Founded in 1982 the company is a current day giant in the gaming industry. They have published many great series such as Command and Conquer, Battlefield, Mass Effect, Crysis, Dead Space, and many more. They also created the Frostbite Engine from their development of the Battlefield games starting from the first Bad Company title, which offered great graphics leaps when truly showcased like it's Battlefield 3 teases with people on the debate of in-game graphics and reality.
However they are also a clear identity of many modern day gaming issues. One such is contributing to the current Loot Box problems of the morally grey micro transaction rabbit hole. Their current licensed sports titles have this system of spending virtual currency to earn randomly rolled virtual trading cards that affect gameplay with people who got better cards beat those who do not. Looped in there is also the micro transactions which are there to entice players to buy packs with paid virtual currency bought by real life currency as playing games normally will not offer virtual currency fast enough to be bearable, depending on the gamer.
Such problems were brought into public eyes with their implementation of it in Star Wars Battlefront 2 beta where players character stats were based on ability card's levels earned by upgrading a ability card with duplicates of itself where it broke game balance and players who accelerated their progress by getting card packs with money beat those without spending a dime and neglecting skillful play.
Also it sparked more fires in the issue wither their responses in the UK court cases of Lootboxes with their representative identifying them as "surprise mechanics", and a community reply about cosmetics of "a sense of pride and accomplishment" with the way it was implemented in the Battlefront 2 beta.
EA was also sometimes called Ucronic Arts as a play on the Transformers Unicron character. There earned this name as they absorbed obtained studios they purchase or make and then disassembled the original developers to not re-establish their owned properties, unless they were guaranteed hits, because of big money. Prime example is the Command and Conquer series where they purchased Westwood studios who developed the title after publishing a few of them. After their Red Alert 2 entry to the series EA broke up the studio shuffled members around and Westwood was no more.
Same could be said about Dead Space series where it started from an EA studio that rebranded into Visceral games which was dissovled after their 3rd entry into the series that was a departure from the series norm that didn't go well with fans, and the single player micro-transactions. Visceral games would later turn into a support studio that then just disappeared from gaming.
And again Bioware, where they purchased them and then developed Mass Effect series and then broke then EA declared that all their games would utilize their in-house Frostbite engine to unify all their studio's technologies. This move contributed to their problems with games in development at the time Dragon Age Inquisition, Mass Effect Andromeda, and Anthem. These games had launch issues and incompatibility with their own inhouse tools due to the different technology that powered the engine and its lack of support from the engine developers based in reports by notable game journalist Jason Schreier.
It's a big company that had a great pedigree but even now there is weird questionable things going on, such as its re-use of assets in their annual sports titles with the removal of game mechanics to only re-release them in future titles and their current locking of graphics features of their FIFA 22 pc release being only last gen and only Xbox Series and PS5 getting the upgraded graphics and animation systems. They used to be well loved for the games they made, but now impressions are on not developing proper games and making systems that encourage spending of money for some sort of exclusive or accelerated unlock in multiplayer games. While they have made attempts to make a better public image of themselves to average gamers, their behaviors contrast against their once in a while good thing.
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