EA Repeats As 'Worst Company In America'

An anonymous reader writes "Electronic Arts has successfully defended its title as the 'Worst Company In America.' Consumerist finished its annual tournament for bad companies, pitting notorious companies against each other in a single-elimination bracket where readers vote on which is worse. EA won last year, and today Consumerist announced the results of this year's final vote. EA was voted worse than Bank of America by 78% of participants. 'A made a royal mess of the SimCity release by failing to foresee that the people who would buy the game — and who would, per the game's design, be required to connect to the EA servers — might actually want to play at some point in the week after making their purchase. But that's just the latest in EA's long history of annoying its customer base with bad support.' Of course, EA saw this coming, and its CEO pre-emptively responded last Friday. Of course, many of his explanations and promises rang hollow for gamers who are sick of the company's practices: 'Until EA stops sucking the blood out of games in order to make uninspiring sequels, or at least until they begin caring about how much gamers hate their lack of respect for our money and intelligence, this is going to continue. We don't hate them because we're homophobes, we hate them because they destroy companies we love. We hate them because they release poor games. We hate them because they claim our hate doesn't matter as long as we give them our money.'"

Comments

Simple

[Locke2005]

Your hate doesn't matter as long as you keep giving them your money. Here's an idea: stop giving them your money!!!

Re:Simple

[eksith]

Rephrase: Better to be rich than loved

If people showed their disapproval with money rather than vitriol on social media, EA would have been a completely different company... or out of business.

Re:Simple

[Baloroth]

It should be pointed out that EA did lose a ton of money last year ($45 million quarter 4 2012, $381 the quarter before that). If they keep on track they should go out of business pretty quickly.

Re: Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

You are doing a good job teaching them why libertarianism ultimately leads to a hypercapitalist dystopia. The vast majority of people making up "the market" are not informed, do not want to become informed, and probably cannot become informed in any meaningful way for any appreciable percentage of the product categories they participate in.

You might be the smartest, most savvy consumer around, always rationally voting with your dollars--but most people aren't, and they're going to dilute your good choices with their bad, uninformed, irrational or random ones.

Re:Simple

[Colonel Korn]

It should be pointed out that EA did lose a ton of money last year ($45 million quarter 4 2012, $381 the quarter before that). If they keep on track they should go out of business pretty quickly.

You're assuming that their business model is rooted in a capitalist economy. You couldn't be more wrong. See also: "Too big to fail," vendor lock-in, copyright, patent troll, "right to profit"...

You're arguing that EA will be bailed out because the government sees its continued existence as too important to jeopardize?

Re:Simple

[Opportunist]

As if. In this time and age, voting with your money fails on more than one level.

What happens when you vote with your money and don't buy their crap anymore? Didn't we learn anything of the antics of the RIAA, and later the MPAA? Their products sucked, we turned away from their overhyped crap and went on with our lives, we voted with our money. So now they claim it's not that we don't buy their stuff anymore because it sucks, no, it has to be that we're accessing it illegally. You really think EA's reaction would be any different if people just up and went away, if people ignored their latest and greatest invention because they already know how bland, nondescript and simply not worth the money their "Whatever 2013" will be? You think they'd go "gee, maybe we overdid it, we should reconsider and try to offer what people want so they'll buy it again".

No, the reaction would simply be "they don't buy it, so they pirate it. Lobbying machine to the rescue, we need laws to prop us up".

And they'll get them.

Where's that delusion coming from that we're still living in a capitalist world?

Sadly, it doesn't matter...

[Stormwatch]

We hate them because they claim our hate doesn't matter as long as we give them our money.

Guess what: it doesn't, because tons of idiots keep buying EA's DRM-laden excrement.

Sense of proportion

[blarkon]

Gotta love sense of proportion. You've got companies like Monsanto and Academi (formerly Blackwater) and a raft of multinationals polluting and doing bad stuff - but the one that causes the outrage? EA. You want to know why politicians don't bother fixing real problems? It's because people passionately believe that EA is the worst corporate citizen.

sad, really

[MickyTheIdiot]

EA does suck. They did screw up SimCity in a big way. But they won because gamers are loud, not because they are the worst.

As another forum (I can't remember which now) pointed out, they were up against a company that has foreclosed on houses they don't even hold the note on.

EA screwed up a game. BoA has destroyed lives.

Re:sad, really

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not about EA screwing up a single game. It's about EA's entire corporate attitude towards its competitors that it buys up, and towards its customers. BofA obviously has several bad practices going on as well, but the hate that people direct towards EA is not based on their disappointment with a single game, it's based on their disapproval of the entire way that EA runs itself.

...when they make GAMES. When all they do is MAKE GAMES. In their own tiny, tiny international market, they're terrible. And only in that market. They're highly influential in the GAME market, they treat GAME DEVELOPERS like shit, they run GAMES into the ground, they screw up GAMES, and they suck to GAMERS.

BoA is a bank. They fuck up people's livelihoods, homes, investments, etc, etc, even if they've never touched a video game in their lives. Those shitty interest rates? BoA's fault. Foreclosing on mortgages they knew were bogus to begin with? BoA's fault. Using connections to mess with international trade for their own benefit? BoA's fault. BoA will screw up EVERYTHING — real-world shit, too, not your damn DLC — from shelter to food to clothing to trade to, oh look, GAMES. Game companies deal with money, too.

EA, on the other hand, are entertainers. They don't even have the clout of the **AA. A bunch of noisy fucking spoiled gamers are all butthurt because they've been conditioned to waste money on a luxury based on the pretty pictures and a name. That's why EA was voted the worst company. Not because they actually are. When EA screws you over, you have a substandard luxury that you can trivially ditch and go with someone else. When BoA screws you over, you don't have a home or money to get a home .

Now, if this were about the worst GAME COMPANY in the world...

Utopia

[blarkon]

Oh that we live in such a utopia where the thing that outrages the populace the most about the totality of American corporate behavior is the inclusion of always-on DRM in SimCity.

Debunking EA's spin

[onyxruby]

The consumerist has already debunked EA's attempt to spin this. The link should have been included with the story to prevent EA from blaming this on homophobes or people who didn't like the athlete on the jacket of one of their games.

Re:wow

[geminidomino]

It's not stupid, you're just ignorant. Try reading the links, and you'll see EA's self-congratulatory bullshit claiming they're being "targeted" by anti-gay bigots because they refuse to stop players from making gay characters in games.

Re:EA is right about one thing, though

[Hentes]

The majority of gamers are fanboys reluctant to part with their favourite series of games. EA owns many titles that were once good.

This is pretty stupid

[Ambassador Kosh]

Sure EA is not a great company. Actually I think they are pretty bad but they are not even in the top 10 for the worst companies. Given that we have companies like Monsanto around there is no way that EA is actually worse. We have companies like BP that deal hundreds of billions of dollars in environmental damage and the taxpayer gets most of the bill and somehow EA is worse because they have DRM and crappy servers? We have some drug companies that have made fraudulent journal articles in order to push medications that they know are lethal but are very hard to trace back to them and even when they are caught pay tiny fines compared to the money they made and somehow EA is worse?

Yeah I just don't buy it at all. This is more like some kind of internet popularity contest and it is popular for people to hate EA. Most people have no clue about what evil companies actually do because they don't really look around them. If EA is the worse company you know of then grow up and look around the world a bit and find out what worst really is.