EA doesn’t want to be worst company in America

Electronic Arts, one of gaming’s biggest publishers, doesn’t want to be voted worst company in America for the third time in a row in 2014.

Speaking during an interview with MCV, EA’s Patrick Söderlund, now the Executive Vice President of EA Studios (a combination of EA’s sports and games studios under a single brand), said that the company was looking at why their image was bad and what they could do to regain consumer trust.

“I don’t believe for a second that we are the worst company in America,” Söderlund said, “but I do believe when something like that happens, you have to sit down and ask yourselves why are people saying these things? We did that and we started to realise that we are doing things that people don’t like.”

Patrick Soderlund, Vice President of EA Studios

Söderlund says that EA’s mission is now to rebuild their reputation as a trusted company for the next generation of gamers. With a clean slate in the form of the Sony PS4 and the Microsoft Xbox One offering them an opportunity to do new things and attract new gamers, the company realised that they needed to use the opportunity to regain the trust of gamers.

“We looked at something as simple as the Online Pass,” he added. “People were telling us they didn’t like that. So we weighed up the pros and cons and removed it. These decisions need to be driven by what consumers want and tell us, and that is where we may have faltered a bit in the past..

“We don’t want to be bad, we have no desire to be voted the worst company in America. On the contrary we want to be voted the best.”

On the lower sales that EA was seeing with their games on the previous-generation consoles, Söderlund posits that gamers seem to prefer hopping into a new generation rather than play their games on an older platform which doesn’t look as good in comparison.

“It is always going to be difficult to sell games on an older platform when something new is coming. It feels like people are really waiting for something new. I think with ours and others’ games you will see a big and strong attach ratio for the next-gen.”

Mirror’s Edge will see an origin story for Faith in 2014.

That “something new” could be a lot of things, actually. DICE is working on Star Wars Battlefront and Mirror’s Edge, and Titanfall is aiming to redefine the online shooter. Despite its failings on the desktop PC, Need for Speed Rivals’ approach to drop-in-drop-0ut co-op gameplay is one way to revamp the open-world racing genre.

At the end of the day Electronic Arts has some good ideas up their sleeve and some great studios under their wing. It just remains to be seen if they can do the right thing for gamers as opposed to whatever reaps the most profits. They have a long way to go before earning back the trust of gamers.