They could've "done better" by actually saying what they will do to improve things. This was an absolutely atrocious PR piece. It didn't address any of the issues people were having.
"45 million registered users are proving them wrong."
Such a goofy and useless statistic. When you require registration for your products, that doesn't mean people are satisfied users of your service, it means you got a lot of people to sign up. It's not an accurate metric for how many people actually enjoy and use the service.
Continuing...
"Some people think that free-to-play games and micro-transactions are a pox on gaming. Tens of millions more are playing and loving those games."
Again: just because you have a bunch of people willing to pay you money for your crap, doesn't mean it isn't crap and you couldn't be doing better.
This sort of defense mechanism doesn't even address the problems people are having. It's almost insulting to everyone who does, legitimately, have a gripe with EA as a company. Those folks angry with EA's principles, games, or for simply not getting the value of what they paid are being cast aside.
It's extremely obvious they're less concerned with addressing issues and more concerned with telling everyone about how many users they have or what their sales are:
"But here’s the truth: each year EA interacts with more than 350 million gamers; Origin is breaking records for revenue and users; The Simpsons: Tapped Out and Real Racing 3 are at the top of the mobile charts; Battlefield 3 and FIFA are stunning achievements with tens of millions of players; and SimCity is being enjoyed by millions of passionate fans all over the world."
It seems possible to paraphrase the entirety of this press release: "We recognize a lot of people hate us, but hey, we've got a lot of other people paying us who aren't you, so we can't be that wrong, can we?"
> It's extremely obvious they're less concerned with addressing issues and more concerned with telling everyone about how many users they have or what their sales are:
All of it can be interpreted this way: this PR piece isn't meant to address customer concerns -- it's meant to address shareholder concerns.
To be fair, people werent exactly happy when they had to sign into Steam to play HalfLife2 in 2004 either. Times are different i know, but people tend to forget that Steam was forced upon us in quite similar ways and really wasnt everyones darling like it is today.
Free mobile games such as Simpsons tapped out require you to signup to origin to interact with anyone else. That is a ton of people with origin accounts that have never paid a cent for anything and also haven't visited it outside of a mobile game.
Whereas I have a steam account with a heap of paid for games. So in both cases I contribute to the total user count, dollars spent though is completely different.
> Again: just because you have a bunch of people willing to pay you money for your crap, doesn't mean it isn't crap and you couldn't be doing better.
Personally I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with F2P games with micro transactions. I feel Riot has created a great F2P game with League of Legends. Micro transactions are only used for non-essential stuffs (for example skins for your heroes or to "buy" heroes quicker then possible by the normal "grind").
For the rest I agree with your opinion. And with regards to SimCity, I really feel they should change the game to make the always-online functionality not required. Sooner or later the services will go down and in the current state the game will be useless.
I'm not sure what your expectations are of a PR piece...do you want to see EA's KPI dashboard and development roadmap? Shareholders don't even see that, so why should you? And to be fair, I think a specific thing they mentioned was giving away SimCity for free to 900k users, that's not trivial.
I actually really appreciated the honesty of this piece because I think it shows some integrity on EA's part to be willing to admit fault. How many companies have driven themselves into irrelevance and destruction by thinking they were right every time?
I don't think it's worth talking down their numbers either, consumers vote with their wallets. If you really though a product was crap, you'd find something else, otherwise there's clearly something of quality there that keeps you coming back.
I work in the newer side of the games industry and see in painful detail how far EA has to go to catch up with recent trends and regain their dominance in the marketplace, but as someone who's also had my fair share of memorable experiences from EA games, I'm pulling for them.
when you're misquoting people to make your point, maybe something is wrong with your argument. BTW I have no connection to EA and don't think I own any EA games.
Spin 101: Muddy up the legitimate complaints about Origin and the fumbled SimCity launch with anecdotes about conservatives carpetbombing the company with hate mail regarding LGBTQ playables. Notice that was the last bullet point; you move forward to the next paragraph thinking "wow, that's terrible," and you're shocked enough about that to start forgetting the first bullet points. The next paragraph then doubles down on the LGBTQ hate. You've completely forgotten the SimCity bullet point now.
Oh yeah, and without you realizing it, he just lightly compared your complaints about SimCity always-on to gay bashing and not liking the choice of a cover athlete for a sports game. Apparently, EA considers all of them equally frivolous. How 'bout that, huh?
This is a pretty good example of how to tell your customers that they're wrong but not leave them feeling like you did so (he did get pretty direct on the DRM point, though, which is interesting). Just look at the love pouring in on the comments over there already, which shows you that it's working in the general case. Not to mention completely omitting what you're going to do about the problems, but cleverly disguising the omission itself.
A final thought, all of that aside: If I were Will Wright, I'd be genuinely sad about what happened to SimCity regardless of the circumstances of the Maxis sale. He left EA in 2009, which makes you wonder how long this SimCity has been in development; I'd wager about three years. That's a hallowed franchise in gaming, in my opinion, a unique IP that stood among the ranks of Civilization in its own way for many years and spawned really fun games like SimTower and SimAnt, and after this it will never be the same.
Wow. That LGBT bullet point and statement left me mouth agape.
No matter what opinions and thoughts you have on gay marriage and LGBTQ issues, it's blatantly obvious that there is a current cultural shift in the US. In a max of 10 years, and probably much sooner, gay marriage will undoubtedly be legal. And right now, it's more socially acceptable to support gay marriage and hold progressive LGBT views then to not.
So when EA tries to play the 'we will not back down from our core principles!' card, it comes out sounding like a lame cry to try and drum up some good feelings towards EA.
Then the conclusion "The tallest trees catch the most wind. At EA we remain proud and unbowed." just reenforces this.
A poor decision by EA to write and post that statement.
"Many continue to claim the Always-On function in SimCity is a DRM scheme. It’s not. People still want to argue about it. We can’t be any clearer – it’s not. Period."
He's flat out lying. I have no interest whatsoever in what he is saying. SimCity can technically run offline, gamers want to run it offline, but EA won't let you run it offline because you could then pirate their software. They should just demonstrate some courage and admit it.
Lying - maybe not. It sure works like a DRM scheme. But EAs position to this has always been "we did it for the social interactions, and to make simCity possible by computing things on our servers!" (sure, that last part was a lie). SimCity can run offline, but it's hard to argue about motivation. Maybe one should give him that point.
In the same spirit - here the sentence he wrote which offended me the most:
> The complaints against us last year were our support of SOPA (not true), and that they didn’t like the ending to Mass Effect 3.
The complaints against the ending of Mass Effect 3 reach far deeper than "not liking". The ending broke every promise and every announcement made about it prior and it lead to the feeling that every decision made in the whole trilogy was meaningless, because no decision had any effect in the ending at all, neither in the result nor in the fight before(!). That is not "not liking", that broke hundreds of thousands of gamer-hearts and still hurts.
To start a PR-fluff-piece with a misleading on such an emotional topic doesn't seem very smart to me.
I think we don't actually know their motivations. For example, it could be as simple as they want to be able to sell stuff in-game, wanted to save development time by eliminating another configuration to test, push software upgrades and bugfixes, monitor your play time, resist cheaters, or eventually leverage players into an online social network. It could also be an anti-piracy DRM measure too of course.
And even if he's not - he should concede this point. There's no winning for EA if they continue to argue this, consumers have already made up their mind about it. They should cut their losses and own up to the SimCity debacle.
While there are a few valid points raised, by and large this screed reminds me of the last time I worked in IT in a large bank, and took the annual employee satisfaction survey.
The IT function had the poorest scores across the entire bank, and the CIO took quite a bit of heat for it from the rest of the CxOs.
His approach to tackle the poor employee satisfaction scores was to call an IT-wide "town hall" and explain to each of us why we were wrong in being dissatisfied...
I agree. The whole letter is one of the best documentations of large-corporation dysfunctional defensiveness I've ever seen.
It's perfect. And not in a good way.
The sad thing is that by putting something so self-deluded and defensive out in public, he's guaranteeing a death spiral for corporate morale and corporate recruiting. It's awful leadership.
What a completely and utterly tone-deaf response. "The tallest trees catch the most wind". So EA is hated because it's big? What about Valve? Why doesn't Sony get the same hate?
More than anything, I'm confused as to just who his intended audience is, here. Certainly none of the gamers who have had long-standing issues with EA for years would find this "mea culpa" convincing. The only people I can imagine would be convinced or swayed by this would be EA employees and management. Is it part of some internal political battle being played out in public?
Either we're not the intended audience for this message, or the C-levels at EA really are so delusional and detached from their customers that they think they can rub a little PR pixie dust on their reputation and make it all better.
This reads exactly like the way a high-level exec of a massive company would think - numbers focused without truly understanding the issues that people might have with the company. Unable to separate mindless complaints that should be ignored out of hand (cover choice for Madden) versus the always-on or free-to-play mechanic which represent legitimate complaints. EA is not one of the worst companies in America by a long shot. But they have very little respect for the consumer.
Today on HN I see a link to a Gamasutra article where industry people are talking about just how incredible some of the LucasArts games were (20 years ago!) and another link where one of the heads of EA is making excuses for why people hate his company. Some of his points are valid, and people can be immature and ridiculous in their reasoning (or downright horrid). But he overlooks some of the valid complaints that people have with EA. And they are valid. He's throwing out the baby with the bathwater, so to speak.
I've always found defensiveness really unattractive, especially in companies. Unless you are bringing new facts to bear, any piece that tries to make the "we're not so bad as all that" argument will probably be unsuccessful at winning hearts or minds.
> This is the same poll that last year judged us as worse than companies responsible for the biggest oil spill in history, the mortgage crisis, and bank bailouts that cost millions of taxpayer dollars.
Thing is, customers don't have a love-affair with the products of those other companies. We do with EA's products at their best. A great game is a treasure, personal, forming great experiences and memories in almost the same way a child or puppy does.
So when a game maker fails so epically, betrays their customers so thoroughly and completely, it tends to spark a serious reaction. A reaction more akin to a friend betraying you and selling you out.
As for oil spills: I can envision how that might happen through mere incompetence and laziness. I have more trouble envisioning how EA can do what they've been doing through mere incompetence; it's far more baffling than that.
Do gamers enjoy paying an extra fee to play used games online? There seem to be no end to the accolades thrown your way for centralizing multiplayer on EA servers and shutting them down a year or two after game release.
In case you really are kidding yourselves with this press release, you are likely being voted the worst company because your millions of customers are suffering your "innovations" -- not enjoying them -- in order to play series they've come to love: Mass Effect, Dragon Age, and SimCity. You are cashing in the stored value of these brands, not building on them.
But look, Microsoft was hated for a long time, too, and it didn't seem to hurt them any. Well, except maybe in the instances where they got into telling their users what they wanted instead of finding out what they wanted. It's not like you folks are going down that road, right?
The basic message seems to be: We're doing fine in terms of strategy, if not execution.
The mea culpas are limited to basically fumbling implementation details: games falling short of expectations, server end-of-life schedules, the botched SimCity launch. But not the fact that SimCity is always-online (which we're told is not DRM), or the question whether games need to be set up in a way that EA has the ability to disable multiplayer functionality.
Those are strategic decisions, which like F2P games and micropayments and building their own online distribution platform, they are on the right path. Putting those issues along with different sorts of controversies such as LGBT content in games seems a bit odd.
There are obviously many reasons to hate EA, but it is FAR from the worst company in America. Overall EA has had a positive effect on the economy and created many jobs (even if they are not "great" jobs). Many other companies have taken govt. bailouts and/or gambled tax-payer money. Let's be civil and have some perspective.
So it's basically a bracket. Not the most well-thought-out approach. Who picks the companies that are even eligible? Why not just have one big poll at the start? Even if they took that approach, I think it's clear EA would still 'win' since there is definitely a votebomb-like effect (much like what happens with MetaCritic ratings occasionally). Clearly the type of people that were aware of this poll in the first place mainly reside on videogame forums (Neogaf, /r/gaming etc), so the mob mentality is natural. Who can honestly say they were aware of this poll?
If you knocked on the door of every household in America and asked them who they thought was the 'Worst Company' in the world, it certainly wouldn't be EA.
I am not defending EA as such, I don't agree with some of their business practices, but there are copious amounts of hyperbole and for people to be treating this like an accurate study is ridiculous.
There is certainly a first-world problems vibe when a videogame publisher wins a poll like this.
Can they do better? If so, why aren't they, and how do they propose to do so? Nice to see they realize that everyone hates them... Now if only they'd provide something other than useless rhetorical spin. Good example of how NOT to run a company.
Jiminy Christmas. Can you get a better illustration of the seething entitlement of gamers than EA being a finalist in a worst-companies bracket that included ABInBev, both AT&T and Verizon, Ticketmaster, credit-reporting agency Equifax, United Airlines, Carnival Fecal Coliform Cruises, Comcast, yes, really, Comcast, Walmart, and Bank of America?
There is no parallel universe in which EA is worse than half these companies. The result we have now brings discredit to the whole enterprise of worst-company contests.
If EA's COO had a soul, he'd write a long-form blog post about how bad United Airlines, Ticketmaster, Equifax and BofA are.
I think it was "most hated" rather than "worse", you're right there are lots of companies much worse than EA.
OTOH I think that people feel that video games should be a source of joy and pleasure so feel especially betrayed when a game company turns around and sprays them with this sort of corporate BS.
It's like if my bank sends me a letter charging me for not having enough money + another charge for sending me the letter I just expect that because they are a bank, I just accept them as a necessary evil. They don't exist to make me feel good.
OTOH a video game company's raison d'être is to make people feel good so if they are attracting hate then they're really fucked something up.
" Many continue to claim the Always-On function in SimCity is a DRM scheme. It’s not. People still want to argue about it. We can’t be any clearer – it’s not. Period."
This was by far the most aggravating part in his entire "Defense"(as in reading this made go to the consumerist and vote for them as the worst company in America)
Ok maybe he's right, maybe it's not DRM. He provides no proof of it but maybe he's right. What doesn't address was the always on line requirment, for whatever reason they decided it was necessary to put in the game, was broken making the game broken. Essentially they sold a broken product.
I was excited by the prospect of seeing a new CEO come in and possibly change the culture of EA, but after reading this piece I'm thinking that idea was probably naive. This lack of user empathy seems pretty pervasive.
At the beginning I thought it was good piece of humble thoughts: What did we do wrong ? How can we improve ? Then I realized it was exactly the contrary. Atrocious.
[+] [-] randomdrake|13 years ago|reply
"45 million registered users are proving them wrong."
Such a goofy and useless statistic. When you require registration for your products, that doesn't mean people are satisfied users of your service, it means you got a lot of people to sign up. It's not an accurate metric for how many people actually enjoy and use the service.
Continuing...
"Some people think that free-to-play games and micro-transactions are a pox on gaming. Tens of millions more are playing and loving those games."
Again: just because you have a bunch of people willing to pay you money for your crap, doesn't mean it isn't crap and you couldn't be doing better.
This sort of defense mechanism doesn't even address the problems people are having. It's almost insulting to everyone who does, legitimately, have a gripe with EA as a company. Those folks angry with EA's principles, games, or for simply not getting the value of what they paid are being cast aside.
It's extremely obvious they're less concerned with addressing issues and more concerned with telling everyone about how many users they have or what their sales are:
"But here’s the truth: each year EA interacts with more than 350 million gamers; Origin is breaking records for revenue and users; The Simpsons: Tapped Out and Real Racing 3 are at the top of the mobile charts; Battlefield 3 and FIFA are stunning achievements with tens of millions of players; and SimCity is being enjoyed by millions of passionate fans all over the world."
It seems possible to paraphrase the entirety of this press release: "We recognize a lot of people hate us, but hey, we've got a lot of other people paying us who aren't you, so we can't be that wrong, can we?"
[+] [-] ihsw|13 years ago|reply
All of it can be interpreted this way: this PR piece isn't meant to address customer concerns -- it's meant to address shareholder concerns.
[+] [-] kayoone|13 years ago|reply
I agree with the rest of your comment though.
[+] [-] CamperBob2|13 years ago|reply
Hell, Stalin had that many in 1948!
[+] [-] robryan|13 years ago|reply
Whereas I have a steam account with a heap of paid for games. So in both cases I contribute to the total user count, dollars spent though is completely different.
[+] [-] nostromo|13 years ago|reply
Why do people buy EA games if they hate them so much?
[+] [-] wsc981|13 years ago|reply
Personally I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with F2P games with micro transactions. I feel Riot has created a great F2P game with League of Legends. Micro transactions are only used for non-essential stuffs (for example skins for your heroes or to "buy" heroes quicker then possible by the normal "grind").
For the rest I agree with your opinion. And with regards to SimCity, I really feel they should change the game to make the always-online functionality not required. Sooner or later the services will go down and in the current state the game will be useless.
[+] [-] patrick-james|13 years ago|reply
I actually really appreciated the honesty of this piece because I think it shows some integrity on EA's part to be willing to admit fault. How many companies have driven themselves into irrelevance and destruction by thinking they were right every time?
I don't think it's worth talking down their numbers either, consumers vote with their wallets. If you really though a product was crap, you'd find something else, otherwise there's clearly something of quality there that keeps you coming back.
I work in the newer side of the games industry and see in painful detail how far EA has to go to catch up with recent trends and regain their dominance in the marketplace, but as someone who's also had my fair share of memorable experiences from EA games, I'm pulling for them.
[+] [-] anigbrowl|13 years ago|reply
when you're misquoting people to make your point, maybe something is wrong with your argument. BTW I have no connection to EA and don't think I own any EA games.
[+] [-] Jauny|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tiredofcareer|13 years ago|reply
Oh yeah, and without you realizing it, he just lightly compared your complaints about SimCity always-on to gay bashing and not liking the choice of a cover athlete for a sports game. Apparently, EA considers all of them equally frivolous. How 'bout that, huh?
This is a pretty good example of how to tell your customers that they're wrong but not leave them feeling like you did so (he did get pretty direct on the DRM point, though, which is interesting). Just look at the love pouring in on the comments over there already, which shows you that it's working in the general case. Not to mention completely omitting what you're going to do about the problems, but cleverly disguising the omission itself.
A final thought, all of that aside: If I were Will Wright, I'd be genuinely sad about what happened to SimCity regardless of the circumstances of the Maxis sale. He left EA in 2009, which makes you wonder how long this SimCity has been in development; I'd wager about three years. That's a hallowed franchise in gaming, in my opinion, a unique IP that stood among the ranks of Civilization in its own way for many years and spawned really fun games like SimTower and SimAnt, and after this it will never be the same.
[+] [-] freditup|13 years ago|reply
No matter what opinions and thoughts you have on gay marriage and LGBTQ issues, it's blatantly obvious that there is a current cultural shift in the US. In a max of 10 years, and probably much sooner, gay marriage will undoubtedly be legal. And right now, it's more socially acceptable to support gay marriage and hold progressive LGBT views then to not.
So when EA tries to play the 'we will not back down from our core principles!' card, it comes out sounding like a lame cry to try and drum up some good feelings towards EA.
Then the conclusion "The tallest trees catch the most wind. At EA we remain proud and unbowed." just reenforces this.
A poor decision by EA to write and post that statement.
[+] [-] ghshephard|13 years ago|reply
"Many continue to claim the Always-On function in SimCity is a DRM scheme. It’s not. People still want to argue about it. We can’t be any clearer – it’s not. Period."
He's flat out lying. I have no interest whatsoever in what he is saying. SimCity can technically run offline, gamers want to run it offline, but EA won't let you run it offline because you could then pirate their software. They should just demonstrate some courage and admit it.
[+] [-] onli|13 years ago|reply
In the same spirit - here the sentence he wrote which offended me the most:
> The complaints against us last year were our support of SOPA (not true), and that they didn’t like the ending to Mass Effect 3.
The complaints against the ending of Mass Effect 3 reach far deeper than "not liking". The ending broke every promise and every announcement made about it prior and it lead to the feeling that every decision made in the whole trilogy was meaningless, because no decision had any effect in the ending at all, neither in the result nor in the fight before(!). That is not "not liking", that broke hundreds of thousands of gamer-hearts and still hurts.
To start a PR-fluff-piece with a misleading on such an emotional topic doesn't seem very smart to me.
[+] [-] marshray|13 years ago|reply
Verifiable fact.
> gamers want to run it offline, but
Verifiable fact.
> EA won't let you run it offline
Verifiable fact.
> because you could then pirate their software.
Whoa, unsubstantiated conclusion there.
I think we don't actually know their motivations. For example, it could be as simple as they want to be able to sell stuff in-game, wanted to save development time by eliminating another configuration to test, push software upgrades and bugfixes, monitor your play time, resist cheaters, or eventually leverage players into an online social network. It could also be an anti-piracy DRM measure too of course.
[+] [-] oacgnol|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] misnome|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TillE|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shrikant|13 years ago|reply
The IT function had the poorest scores across the entire bank, and the CIO took quite a bit of heat for it from the rest of the CxOs.
His approach to tackle the poor employee satisfaction scores was to call an IT-wide "town hall" and explain to each of us why we were wrong in being dissatisfied...
[+] [-] waterlesscloud|13 years ago|reply
It's perfect. And not in a good way.
The sad thing is that by putting something so self-deluded and defensive out in public, he's guaranteeing a death spiral for corporate morale and corporate recruiting. It's awful leadership.
[+] [-] redthrowaway|13 years ago|reply
More than anything, I'm confused as to just who his intended audience is, here. Certainly none of the gamers who have had long-standing issues with EA for years would find this "mea culpa" convincing. The only people I can imagine would be convinced or swayed by this would be EA employees and management. Is it part of some internal political battle being played out in public?
Either we're not the intended audience for this message, or the C-levels at EA really are so delusional and detached from their customers that they think they can rub a little PR pixie dust on their reputation and make it all better.
[+] [-] SkittlesNTwix|13 years ago|reply
Today on HN I see a link to a Gamasutra article where industry people are talking about just how incredible some of the LucasArts games were (20 years ago!) and another link where one of the heads of EA is making excuses for why people hate his company. Some of his points are valid, and people can be immature and ridiculous in their reasoning (or downright horrid). But he overlooks some of the valid complaints that people have with EA. And they are valid. He's throwing out the baby with the bathwater, so to speak.
[+] [-] jamesaguilar|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unoti|13 years ago|reply
Thing is, customers don't have a love-affair with the products of those other companies. We do with EA's products at their best. A great game is a treasure, personal, forming great experiences and memories in almost the same way a child or puppy does.
So when a game maker fails so epically, betrays their customers so thoroughly and completely, it tends to spark a serious reaction. A reaction more akin to a friend betraying you and selling you out.
As for oil spills: I can envision how that might happen through mere incompetence and laziness. I have more trouble envisioning how EA can do what they've been doing through mere incompetence; it's far more baffling than that.
[+] [-] biff|13 years ago|reply
In case you really are kidding yourselves with this press release, you are likely being voted the worst company because your millions of customers are suffering your "innovations" -- not enjoying them -- in order to play series they've come to love: Mass Effect, Dragon Age, and SimCity. You are cashing in the stored value of these brands, not building on them.
But look, Microsoft was hated for a long time, too, and it didn't seem to hurt them any. Well, except maybe in the instances where they got into telling their users what they wanted instead of finding out what they wanted. It's not like you folks are going down that road, right?
[+] [-] jdwissler|13 years ago|reply
I hated the article starting there.
It is cowardly, evasive and deceitful. It completely ignores the issues people have with EA.
[+] [-] Gigablah|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] morsch|13 years ago|reply
The mea culpas are limited to basically fumbling implementation details: games falling short of expectations, server end-of-life schedules, the botched SimCity launch. But not the fact that SimCity is always-online (which we're told is not DRM), or the question whether games need to be set up in a way that EA has the ability to disable multiplayer functionality.
Those are strategic decisions, which like F2P games and micropayments and building their own online distribution platform, they are on the right path. Putting those issues along with different sorts of controversies such as LGBT content in games seems a bit odd.
All in all, the opposite of an apology, really.
[+] [-] gavanwoolery|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] larrydavid|13 years ago|reply
So it's basically a bracket. Not the most well-thought-out approach. Who picks the companies that are even eligible? Why not just have one big poll at the start? Even if they took that approach, I think it's clear EA would still 'win' since there is definitely a votebomb-like effect (much like what happens with MetaCritic ratings occasionally). Clearly the type of people that were aware of this poll in the first place mainly reside on videogame forums (Neogaf, /r/gaming etc), so the mob mentality is natural. Who can honestly say they were aware of this poll?
If you knocked on the door of every household in America and asked them who they thought was the 'Worst Company' in the world, it certainly wouldn't be EA.
I am not defending EA as such, I don't agree with some of their business practices, but there are copious amounts of hyperbole and for people to be treating this like an accurate study is ridiculous.
There is certainly a first-world problems vibe when a videogame publisher wins a poll like this.
[+] [-] Mahn|13 years ago|reply
Well, what a brilliant piece of PR there.
[+] [-] rinon|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcintyre1994|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tptacek|13 years ago|reply
There is no parallel universe in which EA is worse than half these companies. The result we have now brings discredit to the whole enterprise of worst-company contests.
If EA's COO had a soul, he'd write a long-form blog post about how bad United Airlines, Ticketmaster, Equifax and BofA are.
[+] [-] jiggy2011|13 years ago|reply
OTOH I think that people feel that video games should be a source of joy and pleasure so feel especially betrayed when a game company turns around and sprays them with this sort of corporate BS.
It's like if my bank sends me a letter charging me for not having enough money + another charge for sending me the letter I just expect that because they are a bank, I just accept them as a necessary evil. They don't exist to make me feel good.
OTOH a video game company's raison d'être is to make people feel good so if they are attracting hate then they're really fucked something up.
[+] [-] icebraining|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scott27|13 years ago|reply
This was by far the most aggravating part in his entire "Defense"(as in reading this made go to the consumerist and vote for them as the worst company in America)
Ok maybe he's right, maybe it's not DRM. He provides no proof of it but maybe he's right. What doesn't address was the always on line requirment, for whatever reason they decided it was necessary to put in the game, was broken making the game broken. Essentially they sold a broken product.
[+] [-] alex_marchant|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alxbrun|13 years ago|reply
Enjoy until you go bankrupt, dear Mr Moore.
At the beginning I thought it was good piece of humble thoughts: What did we do wrong ? How can we improve ? Then I realized it was exactly the contrary. Atrocious.