What Would Happen If Electronic Arts Just Went Away?

"Test the hypothesis. What would happen if EA suddenly vanished? We'd almost certainly see a destabilization of the speculative investment aspect of video gaming with publicly traded media giants like EA rising and falling on the whims of pundits and misty-magical psychology-driven brouhaha (not such a terrible thing as far as I'm concerned) as well as a whole slew of suddenly unemployed, highly talented designers (a very bad thing, of course). To be sure, the bad would almost certainly outweigh the good for at least the short term, so let's get this much straight: I'm not advocating EA's dissolution, and I'm thoroughly on record by way of reviews celebrating happy events like Crysis, Rock Band, and Command & Conquer 3.

But aside from those, what exactly would we lose if EA folded tomorrow game-wise? EA's long been a stagnant "me-too" publisher in the minds of the gaming press -- clearly not a risk-taker -- and most gaming diehards are sick to tears of the company's perennial sports refreshes, something I think Riccitiello to his credit acknowledges when he admits "We're boring people to death...there's been lots of product that looked like last year's product, that looked a lot like the year before.""

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Personally, the gaming industry would be really fucked up. Why? Instead of boring you with my superiorly ingenious opinion, consider this:

What would happen if ATI/AMD suddenly vanished, thus giving Intel and Nvidia a monopoly in the Video card and CPU chip market?

What would happen if Microsoft still dominated the internet browser market because Opera, Mozilla's Firefox, Netscape, etc all disappeared?

If any of you recall history, a monopoly or oligopoly would form, thus lowering our choices of future products, and there would be zero motivation for any companies to improve products.

No offense to the author but his opinion is very lopsided and not on par with reality. He seems to forget about other publishers such as Take 2, Activision Blizzard, THQ, Konami, etc. In terms of market capitalization, they can still wtf-pwn EA. EA not being there hands monopolistic power to the next biggest gaming company, Activision (in terms of publishing games).

If you don't believe me, why then does Activision-Blizzard try so hard to make great games (Starcraft, Diablo, Guitar Hero, Call of Duty series, etc)?

It's a great thing we're all just journalists, otherwise our stupid politicians might actually listen to us and do something even more fucked up to the gaming industry. Let the gamers determine who should go under or not with their damn wallets.