The predictable EA hate in the vgchartz forums leads me to believe you don't actually play the EA games you think are so lame and uncreative. NHL 08 is supposed to be really good, better than NHL 2k8. Madden 08 was decent, at least on the 360, and it's much better than All-Pro Football 2k8. Skate is better than the latest Tony Hawk, and far more innovative. FIFA 08 is considered by many to be better than PES 2008 I believe. Same with Rock Band compared to GH3. And Burnout Paradise looks quite good also. And didn't they also publish The Orange Box and Crysis?
Wikipedia:
"For 2006, the games review aggregation site Metacritic gives the average of EA games as 72.0 (out of 100); 2.5 points behind Nintendo (74.5) but ahead of the other first-party publishers Microsoft (71.6) and Sony (71.2). The closest third-party publisher is Take 2 (publishing as 2K Games and Rockstar) at 70.3. The remaining top 10 publishers (Sega, Konami, THQ, Ubisoft, Activision) all rate in the mid 60's."
We don't provide the 'easy to program for' console that they [developers] want, because 'easy to program for' means that anybody will be able to take advantage of pretty much what the hardware can do, so the question is what do you do for the rest of the nine and half years? It's a learning process. - SCEI president Kaz Hirai
It's a virus where you buy it and you play it with your friends and they're like, "Oh my God that's so cool, I'm gonna go buy it." So you stop playing it after two months, but they buy it and they stop playing it after two months but they've showed it to someone else who then go out and buy it and so on. Everyone I know bought one and nobody turns it on. - Epic Games president Mike Capps
We have a real culture of thrift. The goal that I had in bringing a lot of the packaged goods folks into Activision about 10 years ago was to take all the fun out of making video games. - Activision CEO Bobby Kotick
