Retired Techie
Getting older, not necessarily wiser!
The EA App, Unfortunately Disappointing
Published on March 15, 2023 at 8:00 am by LEW
Introduction
Electronic Arts (EA) has released their new game app to replace Origins. Recently it has become mandatory. Many a gamer has found themselves staring at the upgrade screen with no other options. And as it turns out, as bad as the Origins app was, the EA app, in many ways is even worse.
I do not want to come off as totally negative. Opening the application, it looks decent, and organization is not bad. The problem is that it is buggy and it is missing a few key features. Looks like another corporate rush job with unrealistic time lines, and designed by a committee, most of which will probably never use the app. Unfortunately that is what we have come to expect from corporate America.
And gamers, you are just going to take it. What are you going to do? Boycott EA? Not play your favorite games? Cancel your account? No to all of this. You are just going to take it, and EA Corporate knows this. Seriously, they do not expect to loose major market share, which is what it take to rectify these issues.
Major Issues
Everyone has their own set of issues, which are probably diffrnet than mine. But here are my issues in no particular order.
- Slow to load! The application takes a bit of time to start up, and cant remember if I am logged in half the time. This really slows things down when you are trying to get into a game.
- No start menu shortcuts to games, they have to be launched from inside the EA app. Can’t think of any reason why anyone would consider this a feature and not a detriment.
- Took hours tom find all my games, and had to futz with several to get them to work properly.
- The app crashes periodically. To be honest, this has gotten a little better, so someone is obviously working on it.
- have had to reinitialize friends lists multiple times, this one has also gotten better but can still be an issue.
- The ability to join a current friends game with an open slot is gone. You literately have to be invited in.
- Some comparability issues with other platforms (specifically Steam), this also seems to be getting better.
- Games get stuck in the middle of downloads. This is somewhat sporadic
Conclusion
Some of these issues may not seem like much to non gamers. None of them are really major on their own. But they do stack. EA could have saved themselves a lot of negative press by delaying the forced adoption of the app until the problems were worked out. But having seen this type of thing time and again from corporate America, some middle managers bonus or promotion hinged on getting the app pushed out by a specific date. Or the team needed something to write on their evaluations, that is we got this pout on time, but lets not say it was a total cluster!
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