Electronic Arts

Electronic Arts

Basic information
Founded	1982
Type	Public
Industry	Video Games
Official website	https://ea.com/

Electronic Arts (EA) is a former video-game developer and now publisher founded in 1982 by Trip Hawkins. It is well known for its simulator titles under the Sim series (The Sims, SimCity, MySims, etc.), titles published under its EA Sports division (Madden, FIFA, etc.), and its Battlefield series.

EA has received criticism for its reliance on microtransactions, its focus on downloadable content (DLC), and other business practices that some consumers perceive as excessively unfavorable (predatory and anti-consumer).

Incidents

Origin shutdown

On April 17, 2025, EA will shut down its Origin client, which was the final option for 32-bit hardware to run EA-published titles. While most consumers have already switched to using 64-bit hardware, the end-of-life of 32-bit support means that vintage enthusiasts, tech historians, and users who previously did not need to upgrade their 32-bit hardware are unable to either install or run the libraries that they paid for.

Lootboxes

See also: EA lootbox controversies

Multiple games published by EA in recent years have garnered significant controversy over what is essentially legal gambling. This is most commonly seen in EA sports titles and their "Ultimate Team" modes, which has players using in-game currency that can be purchased with real-world money to buy card packs, in order to potentially get high-value player cards. This monetization method, considered by many to be "predatory", most notably introduced controversy within the modern release of Star Wars Battlefront 2, wherein the most powerful character in-game, Darth Vader, could only be obtained through this lootbox system. It was not until several weeks after the backlash that EA would tone down these lootboxes by changing loot pools. Lootboxes remained within the title until Disney directly instructed EA to stop because of gambling concerns.

DRM

EA holds the record for most pirated game with the title Spore, which was directly because of EA's use of SecuROM, and was one of the earlier known titles to introduce always-online digital rights management (DRM). Some releases of Mass Effect also used SecuROM, and would instill excessive limits, such as a three-install limit that both could not be refunded by uninstalling and could only be increased through customer-service calls, and a recurring-validation system that required that the game have its activation code run every 10 days. While its use of SecuROM died off in the mid-2010s, the company merely switched to DRM that has been far worse for consumers, Denuvo. One significant EA title that has used this DRM is Star Wars: Jedi Survivor.

Spore

Further reading: Spore

Spore retains a historical 1.7+ million pirated copies, directly related to EA's use of SecuROM. In more recent years, Spore's server access was locked down to EA accounts, mostly thanks to a free Steam key exploit. This has led to various problems for legitimate consumers who merely wanted to play the iconic game and its sibling Darkspore, since according to guides, users could only have a singular install of the game on any device, were required to have an EA account using an alphanumeric password, and needed a CD key to redeem on the user's EA account. This has brought concern among the community, leading to community-developed tools to circumvent these server problems.

License exclusivity

With various intellectual properties, from Star Wars to the NFL, EA has forced its way into holding what is essentially an artificial monopoly over large genres of the industry. Its exclusive licenses with various football organizations, such as the AFL and NFL, has resulted in an antitrust lawsuit against it. This lawsuit ended in a $600K settlement, but did not resolve the primary problems caused by EA's exclusive deals. NCAA players brought additional lawsuits against EA, alleging that it was not authorized to use their likeness in its games. These suits were also settled out of court.

Buyouts and closures

In order for EA to hold its high position, it has been known to buy out its competition. Often, this has led to the detriment of the companies they buy out, and by extension, the media which they release. A historical example, Westwood Studios, which pioneered the RTS genre with the Command & Conquer series, was shut down about five years after its purchase by EA, and its notable franchise was left abandoned years later, with entries either delisted or broken after GameSpy-based DRM were broken circa 2014. While its habit of buying and closing studios has thinned since 2008, it similarly closed Visceral Games, the developer of Dead Space, in 2017.

Positive incidents

Release of Command & Conquer source code

Main article: EA releases source code of classic command and conquer titles

In February 2025, EA worked with C&C community members to open source four Command & Conquer games under the GPL license, in a move widely celebrated by the gaming community.