EA is poised to win the “Worst Company in America” award for a second year running from consumer activist website “The Consumerist”.
In a pre-emptive response to this, EA Chief Operating Office Peter Moore took to the EA blog to defend the company.
Along the way he asserted that millions of EA and Orgin gamers are satisfied with the company and its services, as are the millions of free-to-play gamers using micro-transactions. The Consumerist had some strong reactions to his claims.
Moore did admit the company had made mistakes:
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.
Some of these complaints are 100 percent legitimate – like all large companies we are not perfect. But others just don’t hold water:
- 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 claim there’s no room for Origin as a competitor to Steam. 45 million registered users are proving that wrong.
- 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.
- We’ve seen mailing lists that direct people to vote for EA because they disagree with the choice of the cover athlete on Madden NFL. Yes, really…
- In the past year, we have received thousands of emails and postcards protesting against EA for allowing players to create LGBT characters in our games. This week, we’re seeing posts on conservative web sites urging people to protest our LGBT policy by voting EA the Worst Company in America.
Every day, millions of people across globe play and love our games – literally, hundreds of millions more than will vote in this contest.
So here’s my response to this poll: We can do better. We will do better. But I am damn proud of this company, the people around the globe who work at EA, the games we create and the people that play them.
The tallest trees catch the most wind. At EA we remain proud and unbowed.
Source: EA blog
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I personally think South African gamers are jumping on this bandwagon because of the huge thing American gamers have made of EA and Origin. For me personally I have no issue with Origin, it loads much faster than Steam, I’ve had 20+ games on Origin since day 1 I started using it just because my EA games where registered and after chatting to Live support, I now have over 50 games, all retail games that I have on Origin just because they have been registered. Steam wouldn’t even redeem my copy of Half Life 2 when I bought it in 2004 when they had that huge hack where they lost so many thousands of HL2 keys. I had to send them pictures of my game and a news paper with my face in the picture with my email address and signature and and and only to be told afterwards sorry there is nothing we can do, goodbye. R350 back then down the drain. Contact Origin support for a 3rd time trying to load a retail game onto my Origin account get a DLC free to say sorry that I had to try so many times. My experience with SImCity, I picked up my Pre-order copy on Sunday morning, Installed it, had one Origin Update, two SimCIty launcher updates and that was it choose US east as my server and been playing since that day no issues, no lost saved games no nothing. Sure I lost connection to the EA servers every now and then but it tells you in the upper left side of the screen and when the connection is restored it gives you a tick telling you connection has been restored and it goes away.