Well, it's a bit complicated and it's something I've been thinking about for years. A "what if" scenario. A few years ago I started some discussion in the Bannerlord community about the possibility of the game coming to EA, and what the implications of such a move would be.
See, in my experience, even the best EA projects -- Klei games, for example -- take a very, very long time to release from EA. and the ordinary "good ones" take even longer. Years, in some cases. Look at Kenshi. Small team, granted, but that was a very ambitious project. Bannerlord is effectively a better Warband in most aspects.
For established studios like Taleworld, EA often comes across as an excuse to drag their feet. They already have their money, they no longer have any incentive to deliver a finished product in the near future.
We could be looking at another 3 years of development. Yes, we get to play it along the way, but we aren't getting a finalized product. We're getting a "very rudimentary" (after
10 years!!!) build of it -- in
6 months time. I would much rather play Cyberpunk 2077 in its feature-complete state, on a set release date (with a few bugs, of course) than play a slow trickle of updates over the course of 2 or 3 years.
As a side note, I tend to "spoil" myself with EA games. I play their earliest state quite a bit, and then future updates never feel as substantial, thus I lose interest. I recognize this is my own fault, but that's why I really, really hoped Taleworlds wouldn't do this. I so badly wanted to just
play the bloody game, in a finished but inevitably buggy state, for a pre-determined price, on a specific day. Not tease myself every week/month/6 months with new content updates.
I would
love to be wrong. If Bannerlord's EA was just an unpolished version of the feature-complete game, I'd be 100% on board. Fix the bugs, add luxury features, let the community play early. I think that's the appropriate way to use EA funding for studios of this size. But based on new statements from the team, that seems very unlikely to be the case.
/rant over.