EA Responds To Its Appearance In the 'Worst Company In America' Poll

beerdragoon writes "Electronic Arts CEO Peter Moore has responded to the company's appearance in the finals of the Consumerist's Worst Company In America poll. Moore accepts some responsibility for some of EA's past failings: 'I’ll be the first to admit that we’ve made plenty of mistakes. These include server shut downs too early, games that didn’t meet expectations, missteps on new pricing models and most recently, severely fumbling the launch of SimCity. We owe gamers better performance than this.' However, he ignores or contests many of the common complaints about the company — issues that earned it a spot in the finals for the second year in a row. Quoting: '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. ... 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."

Comments

Re:Nothing will change

[SirSlud]

That's cute, you linked an article from 2004! Get over yourself. A bunch of my coworkers have varying positive to negative things to say about working at different EA studios, but quoting an article from 9 years ago and asserting that working at EA is like working in a sweatshop is fucking disgusting. I worked crazy hours for years, but yet .. we got paid. You want to sympathize with corporate malfeasance? Think about the next time you shop at Walmart. Make your stand there.

You don't like their games? Don't buy them. You don't like the games my employer makes? Don't buy them. But sweatshops are sweatshops. I strive to be a great developer on great games for people that love games, but the sanctimoniousness tone of gamers these days with an outside perspective on how our industry really ticks makes it increasingly more difficult. And don't worry, you shouldn't have illusions about your boycott - there are enough folks like you who paint massive companies or countries or organizations with broad brushes that they actually do have an impact. So you can be happy your scatterbombs do impact the performances of games and get well meaning studios closed and reopened elsewhere (rebranded, because apparently, this is very confusing for people like you.) You might not take down EA, but you can be glad you'll probably be very very slightly responsible for an EA studio here and there to get shutdown for under performing just because of the monolithic brand they were operating under even though you wanted to play such and such a game.

I don't work for EA. I work for a competitor, actually. I just think it's fucking retarded to claim you're into games and think that railing against EA as a whole will lead to some kind of corporate meritocracy in the industry. You think you're playing games? You're the one who's being played.