EA admits mistakes, downplays “Worst Company” award

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.