Again, it's all about the implementation. Some game teams opt to do their own storage of user information rather than rely on the remote service call to the centralized system.

In some cases, like the two projects I worked on, the central system doesn't store all of the user data you need, so you end up storing some in the local system, extending the centralized one. "Some" teams opted to build their own rather than take advantage of the one that existed. (For what it's worth, there is a lot of "build it ourselves" mentality in some teams).

This particular team have a few "interesting" things that they've done beyond the user authentication. Their authorization and entitlement implementations left more than a few of us from other teams scratching our heads as to how they opted to utilize the centralized EA service. It was less than ideal, and did cause some issues for a few other teams.

I don't want to get into it too much, but I guess if there's one message I'd like to share it's that EA is not one big company, but rather a whole bunch of individual development teams working on their own things. As much as there is an attempt to centralize a lot of knowledge and services, it's by no means a given that everyone's doing the same or right thing.

Just because one team totally screwed the pooch on stuff like this, doesn't mean others have as well.

A lot of the teams have some leeway and discretion when it comes to what technologies or internal services they use, and sometimes that's a good thing, sometimes it's not.