Also, let's not confuse a company's business practices with it's products. A company can have bad business practices, but release good or great games (and vice-versa).
Last time I checked, it was a good business practice (but risky) to create and maintain new IPs so you can continually diversify your product line and keep your consumers from becoming fatigued with any one of your older products. EA
could have spent the last few years coasting by on their EA SPORTS franchises and some of their legacy franchises like Command & Conquer and Medal of Honor. But instead they formed Visceral and turned out new IPs like Mirror's Edge, Dead Space, and Dante's Inferno. Hell, two of those sold relatively poorly (one of them twice), and they're getting another chance next year with new sequels. They had to go through quite a bit of legal Hell to acquire Brutal Legend, including all that licensing for the old Heavy Metal music. They made an effort to develop
something worthwhile for the Wii with the two Boom Blox games. They also hooked up with Bioware and Pandemic. Sure, not all of these ventures panned out (especially with Pandemic having to be closed), but it at least shows that EA's been trying to improve its image and give itself a more stable future.
By comparison, Activision's openly just been trying to milk the same franchises over and over again until there's nothing left to exploit, they have a horrendous public image, and they're led by a man who's stated that his goal upon joining Activision was to take all the fun out of making games. Just about all they've done right from a PR standpoint is leaving Blizzard alone to make their games as they see fit (and even then they've meddled a bit, such as splitting StarCraft II into 3 $60 PC releases).