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.
That is a great assessment of the PR piece. It made me realize that my anger with EA for some of the ways I feel they've changed the gaming industry may have caused me to take it a bit too personally.
As someone who was an avid gamer, I felt like the statement was addressed to gamers. But, you may be more correct in saying it was for shareholders anyway.
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.
That was the case in 2004, yes, but now people look forward to getting their games on Steam. The value added by the Steam client is enough to get people to choose games on the Steam platform, as opposed to direct downloads from Amazon or the developer-- in fact, most of those come with optional Steam keys anyways because loading your purchased game into the Steam system is worthwhile enough to do in and of itself. I think the most telling point here is that Valve has only had a handful of it's own games drop-- Portal, HL, L4D, CS, and TF2 are the 5 that come to mind, and that's over 9 years-- compared to the number of IPs that EA binds to Origin, and yet people still choose to load their 3rd-party games into the Steam client.
Origin, on the other hand, is coming into the market as an underdog entry from a hated company with a history of decommissioning game's DRM and multiplayer servers within a couple years of the game's release. While they've only had 2 years in the market to Steam's near-decade, unless Origin manages to come up with significantly more value added to the client itself, their IP is going to be their sole draw.
Valve has since proven itself, though. EA has done the opposite. If Valve disappointed people as consistently as EA does, people would still hate Steam — but instead Valve has made it the most unobtrusive DRM scheme known to man.
I think they aren't very happy today, too. I believe the registration itself is bad customer experience, be it with Origin, U-play or Steam.
I've bough^W licensed a DRM-encumbered game. Well, that happens. Just silently create me a nameless account behind the scenes without bothering me with forms and whatever. Tie it to PC and in case of reinstalls or multiple devices let me authenticate by entering CD key or whatever proof-of-purchase's available and then ask to create a password.
Meanwhile, just lure me to social hub or store with a menu option(s). If I'll find the service useful, I'll eventually fill out the details. If I won't - no reason to care about me anyway, as I won't use the service I don't like unless it's really enforced upon.
Nope. Got a game, but have to fill out forms. They want an email confirmation, secret question, obligatory CAPTCHA, cumbersome launcher software and whatever.
I think the disconnect there is that Half Life 2 was a superb achievement in gaming, and worth the investment of dealing with Steam (arguably, Counter-Strike 1.6 started the Steam train, though, and Team Fortress 2 keeps it chugging). If EA gave us a Half Life 2 of its own that required Origin, they might pull it off.
I can't think of one, which is telling. SimCity had the potential to be and, well, wasn't.
The title that required me to install Origin first was Battlefield 3 and thats a pretty awesome game by every measure, if you are into these kind of big budget military shooters that is.
I wouldn't have cared about Origin if it wasn't for a few provisions in their licensing agreement that made me very nervous. In particular the bits about letting them scan your whole hard drive (Steam's only lets them scan the folders it writes to) and the provision they added about "You can't sue us, but we can sue you." While other services have the latter one, having it in conjunction with the former really gave me a huge big brother vibe. I wouldn't have used it with the first one anyway as that's intrusive enough, but the second just made it worse.
In it, they specifically say that the exemptions from this non-lawsuit clause are related to copyright (big claims) and small claims court. Since most users aren't likely to own copyright or patents, I call that stacking the deck of available actions.
Actually I still dislike Steam and avoid that too. Generally I will buy a non-steam version of a game if it is available.
I don't want my computer to take longer to boot up or to run slower in case I want to play a game so I don't have Steam set to start automatically.
This means that if I want to play a Steam game (I have a couple like Portal) I must first wait for Steam to open up, get internet, log in (oh so slowly) and finally it will think about opening my game. However undoubtedly there's been an update and so steam will decide to install this first. All in all I'm bored by the time the Valve logo pops up and the actual game can start loading. Or you know, I could just pirate the game and it would open straight away without the need for Steam.
So in short, Steam is also horrible and forced. But at least they make better games and have something like customer support.
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 actually didn't have any issue with the micro gaming or F2P structure. I completely agree with you in regards to Riot. I was actually just mentioning it as another example of the PR piece simply saying: "but we've got a whole bunch of other people paying for it, so we can't be that wrong."
IP mostly, for example, SimCity (2013) was the first (complete) iteration of the venerable series in 10 years. A lot of people (including myself) were interested in an improvement on games we played as kids and teens back with the first SimCity. The marketing, information and videos released ahead of the game indicated a solid and fun game. Fun enough to warrant at least putting up with an always online experience. To me the biggest issue isn't ultimately the online aspect (while I disagree with it, if it really bothered me I wouldn't have bought it.) The big issue is that for a game with a history of reflectively deep simulation and gameplay, this one falls on it's head hard. I've put a few hours into it, the only challenge in the game is fighting against things that are essentially design issues/bugs, not in the challenge of managing a complex and changing city.
Anyways, this is the first EA game I've bought for myself since SimCity 4, first time I actually installed their platform Origin. Actually that points to the interesting reality, the people who buy these games may be simply purchasing a gift.
The same reason why people are customers of TicketMaster, BofA, Comcast, or many of the companies competing for Worst Company in America: While EA doesn't have a whole monopoly on their market, they are an unignorable player.
People hate TicketMaster but they aren't willing to forego a concert to voice their opinion. People hate BofA but they don't know about the great alternatives they have in credit unions. People hate comcast, but sometimes it's the only ISP available. Similarly, EA touches on all of these fronts.
There's a limited number of people who can publish a AAA title. EA is one of those few.
Further, EA's strategy of late has been to acquire IP to which gamers have already developed a sentimental attachment. So you may hate EA, but you really love Commander Shepard, so you do what you gotta do to keep hanging out with her.
I am not quite sure but I think it might be along the lines of the fact EA cannibalizes so many studios. If you are a fan of a certain game series and then EA comes in and buys the studio that makes it or the rights to it you are still going to try out the next release of the game. The problem is that EA ruins it almost every single time from what I have heard. You can say that people should know that is going to happen due to their reputation but people will always have hope that it will be different just this time.
EA has a LOT of money to throw at games. They're one of the few publishers that can play at that level and put out blockbuster, ridiculous budget games. People like the polish and shine of big-budget games, some of which are genuinely not possible with less money.
Unfortunately, there's also an aspect that consumers don't get a whole lot of choices. Movies are a decent comparison to that. Why are there so many bad sequels that everyone hates? Cause they still buy tickets. Any movie > no movie.
EA still does make great games, sometimes. Their problems tend to be more toward customer-hostile actions (see: SimCity, the myriad Origin customer service horror stories, the letter that spawned this thread) and their tendency to eat smaller studios that were fan favorites before their acquisition (BioWare, Maxis, and so on). That last one is important to understand the vitriol thrown at the company, I think; it's a bit galling to see a franchise like SimCity, that touched so many people's childhoods (like mine), become the joke that it has.
Because on the whole they publish some very good games, even the most staunch EA detractor can admit that. The vocal minority isn't an accurate representation of the millions that buy EA games (and they publish some of the most popular games you can buy, particularly their sports franchises like FIFA & Madden).
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.
When you assume there was malicious intent in misquoting someone, maybe you should check to see if it was intentional or not before attacking their entire argument. I edited my comment for accuracy, but it doesn't make it any less valid.
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.
I think I believe them: the game they wanted to make was one where the "continuous, integrated online world" was integral to the way people played SimCity: only the final product didn't do enough to justify their original intention.
But it is not a question about "belief" (unless you extrapolate that to mean future actions). SimCity has been hacked to demonstrate its completely offline nature.
I've no doubt that it can run like that (and given SimCity works for ~30 mins or so without connecting to SimCity's servers, it's no shock to anybody who actually played the game at launch); but that doesn't mean that their intent when conceiving of the game wasn't for the online aspect to be utterly central and integral to how they wanted people to play the game. The always online "requirement" could absolutely have resulted from that desire rather than DRM.
If it was just a matter of DRM, then it's plain inconsistent with how they're approaching DRM with every other PC release they've done recently.
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.
Yeah. When has trying to convince critics that they're wrong ever worked? EA/Maxis keep trying.
They simply can't win this one. They're in the wrong, and for the most part they probably know it. If they can't say anything positive, the best response would probably be radio silence until everything blows over. Stuff like this only fans the flames.
Or just honesty . . . I don't know how it would blow over in the press, but personally I would find it really refreshing if they just said, "Yeah, it's always online because you fuckers pirate too much. Deal with it." I guess that the gamers would probably not like that very much though.
Indeed, this kind of statements do not make much sense to me. They make the critics angrier and everyone else just wont care. If you instead saying nothing you get the same benefits without making the critics angry.
> 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.
Every year The Consumerist opens submissions for a week or two. Readers submit companies and the 16 finalists are chosen (not sure if it's pure numbers or there is some editorial discretion).
At that point it's all voting by readers.
It's easy for someone like EA to get high in a bracket like this. They've pissed off a lot of people who are active on the internet, and they've been against some easy targets. AnheiserBusch/InBev isn't a company that people line up to hate (unlike Walmart or some other perpetual nominees) and Facebook, despite often acting creepy as hell, is loved by millions and millions of people.
On the other hand, EA keeps making enemies; and their last dustup was just weeks before the content.
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.
Who hates a video game company more than a credit agency, or the cable company that packet shapes and MITMs your Internet connection? Just don't play the game, and you never have to think about them. You can't say that about Equifax.
You just need to thread on some popular forum pushing people to vote. After the Time's Person of the Year and other 4chan-influenced polls, you shouldn't assume there's anything valid about online polls.
Maybe I'm naive, but I dislike EA more than Equifax, and I have actually had Equifax stick nonsense on my report before. I believe Equifax are actually trying to do a good job in general — their mistakes are not the sort where I feel like somebody actively considered me and said, "Eh, screw him" — whereas I don't believe that about EA. Similarly, I don't think Ticketmaster is all that bad these days. My dealings with Ticketmaster have been more pleasant than my dealings with EA.
Your dealings with the company that coerced every concert venue in your major metro area to accept contracts that prevented them from booking concerts through anybody but Ticketmaster so that they could continue to collect nonsensical exorbitant handling fees were better than your dealings with EA, because you didn't like one of EA's games?
I don't recall the fees being all that exorbitant the last several times I bought through Ticketmaster. They came out to something like $2. I am not a rich man, but boy would I feel silly hating a company over a couple of dollars.
Meanwhile, my distaste for EA comes not from my critical evaluation of one of their games, but from the fact that their games don't friggin' work. I don't even play EA games (simply not my cup of tea), but my fiancee loves her some Sims. I defy you to try and do tech support for an EA game and come out still hating Ticketmaster more. I would gladly pay a $5 fee to make their games stop crashing and corrupting her data! There are game-breaking issues in their products that have existed for years for which the only known solution is "Use the version on The Pirate Bay." As one of the few honest PC players who refuses to torrent games, that is just galling to me.
When people wait X years for a game they really want to play and they find it has all of these problem then they will feel let down. Especially when they have competitors who are known for giving much better service.
If you have a shitty ISP who MITMs your connections then either you have the choice of moving elsewhere or if you can't it's because all their competitors are just as shitty.
You can't just go and get Sim City 4 from another company.
You can never have even heard of Equifax and something they screw up can keep you from getting a mortgage, or get your rental car reservation cancelled at 11:00PM right as your plane lands.
I'm sure there are many companies and government agencies fucking me in all sorts of horrible and unexpected ways every day, in fact I basically expect it.
But then at the end of the day when I go to my favorite bar and they serve me warm beer in a plastic glass, guess what I spend the most time bitching about?
" 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.
Maybe listen to the complaints and adress them instead of just dismissing them as wrong. This article just made me upset, they would of done better just shutting up.
I don't think EA deserves to be voted the worst company in America by a long shot. But I do think they need to be publicly shamed to the point that they actually listen to why people don't like them (I don't know if public shaming helps people realize things, I'm not a parent, but it seems like a good idea). Their otherwise interesting products are made far less compelling in order to satisfy business requirements. It's just dumb business. Meet your business objectives in smarter ways while creating smarter products and people will like you more.
In the field of entertainment software, the user experience is paramount. There's also something to be said for letting customers feel like they "own" their games rather than simply leasing them until you close your servers. If you take this away, you'd damn well better provide some fantastic value in its place. To think that people resent you purely because of your choice of cover atheletes, micro-transactions or support of LGBT rights, polarizing as these can be, is evidence of the same sort of thinking which pervades your product development.
"An annual web poll shows that once again, Electronic Arts will be named the "Worst Company in America".
We at EA understand that we provide a lightning rod for many in an industry that has undergone massive change and experienced a great deal of consolidation. We've acquired beloved game developers, we've put storied franchises to rest, and we've sheparded evolutions in gameplay and game design that have been met with skepticism and rejection.
But please believe, we're on the player's side.
Tens of thousands of EA employees show up to work every day to create incredible new experiences and polish fantastic new things that the world has never seen.
You, your family, and your friends entrust us with time, attention, and money in return for fantastic experiences with characters you love and places that are realer than real. It's an honor to work in this industry.
We love these shared stories and adventures, and truly understand what makes videogaming special to hundreds of millions of people every day.
That said, we are a business, and all businessess will make mistakes, fail to meet expectations, and poorly communicate. We're no different.
XXX EXAMPLES XXX
Videogames are unique in that the business environment changes more in six months than most other industries change in decades, and we've struggled to adapt to the new realities just like hundreds of other videogame developers.
We feel it's essential that we have an online content distribution system of our own, called Origin. It's clear that we've fallen painfully short of industry standards in terms of technical execution and customer service, and we most certainly are not meeting our own expectations.
XXX INSERT HONEST FIXES HERE XXX
We also feel that we're failing to incorporate our customer's frustrations, concerns, and desires into the development of our franchises. When some player were disappointed with Mass Effect 3, they had nowhere to voice their opinions where they felt they would be heard.
Thus, as of this week we will be employing ombudsmen for each of our major franchises. They'll be superfans who know the games inside and out, and their sole responsibility will be to communicate with you about what's happening with the development and care of your favorite series and franchises.
FIFA - @Matthiew
Mass Effect - @Jennifer
SIMCITY - @Alyssa
XXX ETCETERA XXX
Feel free to vent, praise, be angry, you name it. They'll be listening. But always be respectful. We're here to have a good time together.
Finally, we understand that server shutdowns are a necessary part of the life of any game. No party goes on forever. But we don't want to shut off the lights too early, and we don't want customers to wonder how long the game they've just purchased will be fully functional and connected.
So today we're instituting a 3 year server guarantee on every network-aware and network-based videogame we sell. You can purchase an EA game and rest assured that you'll have friends to go on adventures with for a long long time.
For what we've failed in, we are truly sorry. We strive to delight one and all, but we can never be perfect. For those who feel we can never do right, you'll find dozens of other talented studios who you can have a more fruitful relationship with.
We don't feel there's any shame in being #1, but we do feel there's a great responsibility in it.
Let us bring you the best games on Earth, tell us plainly and clearly when we're not meeting that expectation, and let's all have fun together.
- EA CEO WHATEVER"
I wrote this in literally twelve fucking minutes. What a prick.
Seriously, good job. Why is it so hard to be honest with customers once a company grows past a certain point? Does the money corrupt, or am I naive, or both?
I dunno. Maybe ten years around Steve Ballmer terminally fucked him up.
The fundamental problem is that his post was targeted at the 10,000 industry and customer elite, none of whom feel like giving the Titan much respect because nobody fundamentally likes the #1 guy.
Who he should have been writing to were the 350M people he claims to support. When you're selling sweet-smelling electronic vapor, you use sweet-smelling words to gently remind people that comparing a videogame developer to ACTUAL HITLER is insane and insulting. That a substantial portion of the market is composed of profound assholes is beyond the point.
You don't play at their level, you don't speak at their level, and you don't engage in CEO Ego-battle 3000X. It's just fucking videogames.
Their true customer is a 15 year old girl playing Simpsons on her Samsung. He should be writing to her.
At the risk of sounding like a grouchy old fart: I still mourn the loss of the old Electronic Arts -- the company that Trip Hawkins founded in order to let the imagination of artists run wild through the nascent world of personal computing. I grew up immersed in EA classics like Skyfox and Archon and Adventure Construction Set and [pause to genuflect] M.U.L.E. The brilliant men and women who crafted these games were actually celebrated in the packaging. You got the sense that the game you bought was truly a creative labor of love. At the time, EA's slogan was "We see farther." Today's EA is by comparison unrecognizable, a giant that has grown too big to care about anything that the original EA cared about, a company whose slogan might as well be "We see the bottom line."
So after being voted worst company in America and writing a post "We Can Do Better" the only thing they acknowledge doing wrong is having the SimCity server crash. ... Companies like GitHub and Google write these posts monthly without such dramatic intros and PR fluff.
Stupid website won't even let me comment. First I have to sign up. Then it snubs me with a short character count. Finally it won't even do anything when I press "ADD COMMENT".
I've tried both Firefox and Chrome with and without javascript and no luck. Well here:
"The customer base as a whole is annoyed because you release buggy unfinished games with horrible DRM. Not because of your LGBT policy.
Your post doesn't sound sincere to me. It doesn't even sound apologetic. It sounds arrogant and like you're saying we shouldn't be complaining instead of admitting your mistakes. You don't address people's real complaints.
I want my wasted money back; not a free game. I don't want to have to use Origin. I want actual customer support and a longer character lim-"
specifically in this case with Madden and NFL2K you are absolutely right. It's not even that nfl2k was any good or not. It's just that the loss of competition gave the various madden dev teams over the years ZERO motivation to do what the hardcore madden gamers wanted them to do to improve the game. yes they (we) are a minority and they want to sell as many copies as possible, but seriously, even in their own house Madden is subpar compared to FIFA. FIFA had online multiplayer a good 3 years before Madden. It took Madden about 7 years into "Next Gen" consoles (PS3/x360) to revamp online franchise even though they actually promised it every year. instead they focus on "Presentation" like hand warmers. please. And they justify their decisions by "Telemetry" aka usage stats, but those are extremely misleading. A couple years ago they put out a half-baked online franchise with horrible bugs. Their "telemetry" told them very few gamers used that game mode, so they decided to scratch it and try to completely redesign online franchise from scratch, again. Well of course nobody used that game mode! It was broken!... ay ay ay, dont get me started...
EA is my first blacklisted company. I stopped piracy last year and now every piece of software on my laptop is purchased or Open Source and Free. This in a country where software is still thought to be free by most people.
BUT I am pirating EA games. Their policies are anything but customer friendly! So while have a 70 game library on Steam, I still have pirated Lord Of The Rings: Battle For Middle Earth 2 and Mass Effect series.
And I can play my games when I want, the way I want without that draconian policy of always on DRM in a single player game.
I am sure I am not alone doing this. With Sim City, they have pissed a lot of people. And with PR like this, they are making this worse.
I don't care much about gaming, but even my casual reading about EA has left me with the distinct impression that you (addressed to EA "Management", I guess) have been exploitative... erm, "jerks" for years. (I had a less PC word in mind.)
Spare me your Johnny come lately mea culpa. Clean up your act, or don't. I don't give a fuck what you have to say.
Wow. So of all the companies in the US, the "worst" one will be either EA or Ticketmaster? Not Lodsys or any of the other patent trolls; not any of the banks or oil companies; not any of the weapons manufacturers or dealers. A video games company or a company that sells tickets to gigs online. OK.
EA is scared, and taking the threat seriously. They are not scared enough to actually address the issue (instead of doing fake PR speeches), but hopefully it will soon be too late for that.
“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
> 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.
Hilarious. The world hates you because of how you treat PEOPLE. Yer a record label, idiots - you fuck people over for fun and profit: coders (artists - remember when you pioneered thinking of coders this way?) and players (you understand the analogy at this point, right?)
I follow a fairly large number of conservatives / Tea Party and libertarians (who would complain about the conservatives in this context) on twitter and the only mention of EA has been Sim City's problems. Must be the same people bitching to the FCC about TV shows.
I think WCIA is an awesome concept and we should do more to tear down, embarrass, and ultimately dismantle bad companies.
That said, the idea that EA would win a WCIA bracket with Time Warner Cable and fucking airlines? Makes a mockery of the whole concept.
Especially now. Yes, AAA games are pure dogshit. No question there. Just awful. It's easy to get nostalgic for 1995. Chrono Trigger was excellent, so was Final Fantasy VI. Terranigma-- also great if you could get it. Back then, we only had great games because someone made them for us. We had to get them from Japan, for the most part, because as bad as Japan's corporate conformity is, it's nothing like US-style executive meddling. (Japanese understand capitalism enough not to let incompetent execs ruin the show. The US has rich fatasses who see executive sinecures as a birthright and have the fertilizer-Midas touch: everything they touch turns to shit.) That meant we had to wait for Ted Woolsey to translate them, and he was not a bad translator (actually, his talent is neat and quirky) but he worked under insane deadlines. You spoony bard! Anyway...
But it's two-thousand-and-fucking-13 and if you don't like the games that exist, make one that is better instead of pointlessly voting in some poll. Show those fuckers up. (Actually, they're as smart as you are. Some, much smarter. They make crappy games because they have bills to pay and moron bosses. You'll understand when you're older.) Build a 2D RPG, a German-style board game, or a casual game, and get it out there. Or don't, and stop complaining that no one is making good games when there's nothing stopping you.
EA doesn't even belong on the top-75 list of worst companies. Where's Xe/Blackwater? Tear them down instead. They convinced the US government to fight an illegal war for their profits, and their CEO is a literal fucking fascist. That is WCIA material. Electronic Arts worse than fucking mercenaries in the 21st century? Seriously, the world needs to get a fucking clue.
I am pretty sure most people voting in the polls a very much aware of this. But voting Xe as worst company of the US? Who would care? Everyone already knows they are that bad and nothing has happened.
On the other hand to vote EA as the worst company has a tiny chance of proving a point. There are lots of people out there who buy AAA titles without thinking and if some of them stopped buying the latest AAA crap EA just might have to start care about quality a bit.
Now I personally avoid this kind of bogus polls, but I see why it can make sense for people who do have a clue to still vote for EA:
"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?"