EA To Stop Publishing Games
Will Siphon Money Directly From Gamers' Pockets Instead.

REDWOOD CITY, CA - In the wake of their exclusive partnerships with the NFL, AFL, and ESPN, EA has announced that they will stop publishing sports games entirely, and instead will simply siphon money directly out of the pockets of potential customers.

According to the press release, all retailers that sell video games will have vacuum pumps installed at the doors. Anyone who enters the store and, therefore, may potentially buy a game from EA will have to allow store employees to siphon any money, credit cards, or spare change from their pockets or purses.

Larry Probst, EA CEO, said they came up with the idea during a brainstorming session for ideas for the next year's Madden game. "We realized, that with those infidels at Konami thoroughly crushed and unable to write any professional football games, or even publish under the 'ESPN' brand name they had previously been using, we didn't need to make a whole lot of improvements to the Madden line of football games. Simply updating the rosters with the players for the next season would be enough to get people to shell out the $50, since where else are they going to buy a football game now?" Probst continued that "eventually we realized that even updating the roster seemed like a lot of work. That's when we decided on the siphoning option."

Probst said they expect gamers not to notice any difference. "We've only been making a half-assed attempts at writing good games since acquiring licensing rights for Lord of the Rings, James Bond, Star Wars, and other major properties. You get to the point when you realize people will just send you money simply because there's a box on the shelf that has a pretty picture and some words they like on it. You tend to lose all motivation to try at that point."

EA announced that, while they would not be writing games, the potential customers would be forced to watch several hours of unskipable company logo animations while their pockets are siphoned. "We'll start with the EA logo, move to the company that might have developed the game, if we cared, then move on to the retail distributor, the logo for the employee who is siphoning your pockets, then throw in a bunch of random ones, just to take up time. Y'know, for old times sake."

When asked if there were any other genres that EA was going to stop trying to make good games in, Probst responded "we had plans to slack off in Massively Multiplayer Online games, but we realized Sony beat us to it."