User blog comment:The Milkman/The Next Effect/@comment-4835791-20121121085253/@comment-4807396-20121122061659

It certainly hurt Dragon Age II; EA wanted DA2 out the door as soon as possible to capitalise on the success of Origins, which led to the dev cycle being shortened by several months, and we all know what the result of that was...

While I agree that constant scapegoating of publishers is stupid, I can't blame anyone for doing it either; EA in particular hasn't done much to endear themselves to gamers in the last 20+ years.

There's also a little piece of EA's history that I find incredibly ironic: people chew EA out all the time for its cheap cash grabs, but it likely only survives to this day because it refused a very big cash grab back in the 80s. Namely, it refused to go into the extremely lucrative console market of the period, sticking to publishing PC games. When the bottom fell out of the console market in 1983, EA stayed afloat while the majority of its competitors died off, allowing it to become the reviled juggernaut it is today.