Created in 1982, Electronic Arts began as a pioneer of home computer gaming. Today the company is one of the top three gaming corporations in the world, creating games like Need for Speed and the Madden series. EA caters to millions of fans across the globe, becoming one of the worlds most well known names in gaming. Being the leader in sports gaming and raking in billions of dollars every year, one expects EA to spend lots of cash on spreading their image and providing superior service and products. Despite this, many customers across the internet find the merchandise of EA, including games and online services, lacking in quality and functionality, and being highly repetitive in their releases. Others feel harassed by the DLC and forced online content and the respect for the EA name has gone down over the past couple of years. Trying to revamp their image, EA has been expanding more into the online community providing services similar to Valve's Steam service, and running multiple ad campaigns and online panels hoping to get the online world interested again in the EA services.
Electronic Arts is a powerful company in the gaming sector, this is evident in the mass array of games that they actual produce. Making their first millions from sports games, EA Sports almost hold a monopoly on the sporting game genre. Along side all the sport games, EA develops, or funds the development of several other extremely popular game titles, including Battlefield and Mass Effect games. These big name franchises give EA a huge advantage over many other developers who only produce one or two game titles. This leads to some fans questioning grumbling about how Ea dominates the market, lording over the smaller developers and buying up all the talent in gaming. This is evidenced by the number of developers the company actually owns, Including Visceral Games, DICE, and BioWare. These companies produce some of the mainline games for EA, and many critics claim that EA rushes production of these games, causing games to be below expectations of the fans. Major evidence for this is the ending for Mass Effect 3, the final chapter of a supremely popular series. Fans all over were disappointed with the ending, blaming EA for messing up the storyline. EA also became notorious for making game owners download portions of games to continue their game. This is known as DLC and usually comes as just bonus content for those who want it. For games like SimCity, a game made by EA, DLC becomes necessary to continue playing after a point. EA also likes to advertise their none mandatory DLC all through out their other games, annoying thousands of fans, causing uproar across the internet. EA also has a tendency to seem repetitive in their game developments. Almost all games created by EA have several sequels that do not deviate far from their predecessors, making many fans get bored with a series. Despite this, thousands of people eat up all that EA has to offer.
In the past few years, PC gamers have become a huge consumer pool for gaming companies. Most of the market has been dominated by Steam, an online gaming database that provides games and a community for PC gamers. To break into this market EA has created Origin, their own version of Steam for their brand of games. The site serves as a marketplace for all the Ea games, both old and new, giving customers direct access to exclusive content and early access to new games. This site should have been a gold mine for EA, but they were met with a myriad of problems upon its creation. The site was plagued with issues from the get go, crashing often and deleting accounts of members all the time. The online community dislike the site, feeling that is was a direct knockoff of Steam, and hated the limited content of the site. EA soon abandoned their crusade for Origin to become an online sensation, reworking it to be just an EA