EA COO Peter Moore (Credit: Getty Images)For
the second year in a row, readers of the consumer-watchdog website The
Consumerist have named Electronic Arts "the worst company in America,"
vilifying the video game publisher more than Bank of America, Comcast
and Ticketmaster (which took second, third and fourth places,
respectively).
The results of the poll are hardly surprising -- even EA predicted it
would repeat the dubious honor -- but they were certainly conclusive.
EA faced stiff competition en route to the championship round,
besting fellow disliked companies Anheuser-Busch, Facebook and AT&T
before squaring off against Bank of America in the final round of
voting. BofA proved no match, however, as EA captured a decisive 78 percent of the vote
to take home the not-so-coveted "Golden Poo" award. It’s the second
straight "win" for EA and the second straight runner-up nod for Bank of
America.
EA was cited for its love of microtransactions, the price of its
games and its irritating DRM practices, among other issues. But the disastrous SimCity launch was a particular sore point.
"EA 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," wrote
the site. "But that’s just the latest in EA’s long history of annoying
its customer base with bad support. Customers who paid full price for
games, or who spent or saved huge piles of in-game cash in EA’s online
products, would suddenly find a problem with their accounts, but
attempts to rectify the problem -- or even get a response from EA --
would go unheeded."
EA chief operating officer Peter Moore, in an open letter to gamers last week, admitted the company could do better, but said the label of "worst company" was undeserved.
"Are we really the 'Worst Company in America?'" he asked. "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. … 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."
Editors at The Consumerist seemed to take umbrage at Moore's pre-emptive defense of the company, deconstructing it
as they announced the final round. The Consumerist also shrugged off
Moore's criticism of EA being compared to companies that have polluted
the planet and evicted people from their homes.
"Make no mistake: Video games are big business," the site said. "A
company like EA -- and Activision, Ubisoft, Nintendo, and Sony, etc. --
merits just as much scrutiny as any other business that plays a leading
role in a multibillion-dollar industry. It’s only a fractured,
antiquated public perception that video games are somehow frivolous
holdovers from childhood that allows gamers to be abused and taken
advantage of by the very people who supply them the games they play."
Though no company wants to win this kind of award, EA in particular
doesn't need more bad news. EA is already dealing with a much more
significant issue thanks to the resignation of CEO John Riccitiello
last month, not to mention continued fallout from the SimCity debacle.
However, investors were undeterred when the company won last year, as
the stock price was unaffected, and it didn't hurt game sales
demonstrably -- though apparently EA is doing a perfectly fine job
hurting itself.
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