There are certainly a lot of people who do actually like their games, but a lot of their revenue comes from a combination of aggressive marketting and that old P.T. Barnum adage. There's a lot of new gamers born every minute, and it takes being burned a few times before somebody learns to avoid EA products.
Right, the 15 year old paying for Madden 32 doesn't realize that they could play Madden 08 released on the gamecube and have a nearly identical experience, including literally the same bugs and broken behavior as that game from 20 years ago.
Do people get that? Modern madden has worse oddities. Madden 08 wouldn't allow you to put more than 255 points on the scoreboard. Modern madden will completely break before you can even reach that point.
The animation/behavior systems have the exact same flaw where if you run a play for more than about 20 seconds characters just... shut off. They stop trying to run after the ball carrier even!
The knobs you can tweak on the simulation engine are the same on N64, Xbox 360, Xbox 1 X series X X'er hyper X, the damn Nintendo DS!
No wonder companies are so hostile to emulation. They would rather just resell the same game, sometimes with nicer textures.
