Most people hate EA because they take over a indie and the indie starts releasing worse and worse games.
THe main issue I have with the stupidity of that reason is most companies that stay independant produce worse and worse games... that is really just how IP's work.
TV, movies, games, books, most people have ONE great idea, spend YEARS thinking it up, fleshing it out then a tv series gets made, film gets made, etc, then they do another one, but rather than the previous years of work to make the best first piece of work, the second is rushed, and rubbish, or they have a bit of money and try to go completely overboard and screw up completely. There is the "run out of idea's" lot and the "hollywood, bigger, more explosions, new features" way of producing stuff that usually works badly. Was the Matrix 2 and 3 not a patch on the first because they were taken over by an evil entity, Godfather 2 and then the woeful three. Die Hard, 1, 2, meh, absymal. C&C 1, 2, RA 1, 2, C&C generals crap, C&C 3 balls, C&C totally awful by now, etc. There are COUNTLESS makes of "art" who start off well and get worse, because that is generally the nature of good idea's, they are rare, and when someone has one they try to rinse every last drop out of it which almost always results in turning something great into something ****.
Many companies make one great game, then make a second that bombs, or maybe a third that bombs then go under. EA to a certain degree prevents a lot of games dying, but still brings out a lot of crap second/third versions of games.
EA isn't to blame, people who make crap sequels are to blame, and most sequels are crap. Fable 1 is great, Fable 2 is all but identical, okay but nothing great if you've played 1, Fable 3 is abysmal.
EA aren't great, neither are they poor, in an industry of crap sequels, they make some of the worst, because they keep franchises/studio's in business that would long since have gone bust without them. Lots of people say they are great to work for, they haven't done an awful lot good lately, but their sequels aren't inherantly worse than other companies sequels.
Bioware went to **** because they went to ****, its got smeg all to do with EA in almost every likelyhood. Plenty of the same guys are involved, the same writers, they are just writing worse quality stuff than they wrote earlier. So if those guys, who EA didn't fire, were writing as well as they did in the earlier games, the later games would have been just as good, simple really.
Off the top of my head I can barely think of a single trilogy, or series of games, where the quality didn't go rapidly downhill, film, TV, games. Even LOTR got significantly worse from the first to third film, they spent less time filming the second/third films IIRC, there were more scenes I thought were really poor, (Elrond "unveiling" the sword in the tent resembled a made for tv movie scene), Matrix, Godfather, Die Hard, Alien, Bourne, Rambo, Star Wars, just about every film franchise that comes to mind dropped off in quality either massively or at least quite a lot. Same goes for every game series I can think of and almost every tv show I can think of. People run out of idea's and start trying to make up for lack of originality by adding random new crap to pad out games/movies/tv that just sucks.
