Author: Gabriel Persechino-Forest Published: August 23rd, 2018
Companies are trying, and have been for years, to sell us on the all-digital future. The problem is that this venue for video games offers little for the average gamer and everything to corporations. For one, it gives control over your entire library to a corporation and if you don’t understand the dangers of that, well one EA Origin user learned the lesson the hard way when thousands of dollars worth of his content was deleted, along with his account, and the company refused to help him.
The user took to Reddit to seek out help because even with receipts and transaction numbers, EA still refused to help him. It is worth noting that Reddit attempted to censor the user as well, One Angry Gamer theorises that it might be because he was posting content critical of EA. To be fair, there is precedent for this line of thinking.
A representative of Electronic Arts finally took notice and responded with:
I’ll echo the sentiment shared by many of you on the thread – no this isn’t acceptable to us that in this particular instance, we haven’t been able to directly resolve this issue via our dedicated support teams, and that it’s taken an early morning hunt for memes for me to discover this thread, which has since hit the top of /r/all. I’m grateful that it’s providing us the opportunity to rectify the issue, but we will assess everything related to this case to understand why this has happened in the first place – in case it can help to prevent similar occurrences for folks in the future.
Please also understand that no matter how this issue gets resolved, I won’t be in a position to ever talk about the specifics relating to the account of one of our players. That’s not cool, that should never happen, but please respect that these things aren’t always what they seem.
As of writing this, EA is still working on this issue.
One Angry Gamer uses the incident to warn people about the all-digital future:
If a company wants to delete thousands of dollars worth of games and make you re-buy all of them, they can. If a company wants to erase your digital library on a whim, they can. If a company wants to pull you along and neglect to offer you proper support, they can. And there’s nothing you can do about it unless you’re rich enough to sue… or, lucky enough to have a post gain 138,000 upvotes on Reddit to make front page news.
Source: Reddit and Article Image: ea.com