EA Repeats As 'Worst Company In America' 346
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.'"
Tagline (Score:0, Interesting)
EA GAMES - we fuckup everything
Thats what i hear every time i start an ea game... not challenge everything.. nope. we fuckup everything. including this game you are restarting because it crashed as it was rushed out and will still need 5 patches before its stable. And we're only going to do 4 patches and then drop support for this game... Why? because fuck you thats why! Stupid customers..
Oh but i'm sure they're not the worst company in america.. Just the worst company in america as voted by internet peoples. Which is still pretty bad..
Downright pathetic for a 2 time winner too.
But hey.. that's what you get when you have spent a DECADE pissing off your customers... you know... the people who at one point paid you money.. and who you have taught over and over NOT to do that...
Fuck you EA games. You turn everything to shit. Even goldmines like simcity. People are STILL playing the decade old version today. Will they be playing the newest version 10 years from now? NOPE! #1 because it sucks balls. #2 because it won't work as it has that online drm shit.
I still don't get how the hell they fucked up simcity... they had the code for sc4... they had the best place to start from. they have all the mods and expansions put out by players to draw ideas on. And yet they fucked it up top to bottom. That takes serious fuckup skills.
Worst Company? Seriously? (Score:2, Interesting)
Debunking EA's spin (Score:5, Interesting)
The consumerist has already debunked [consumerist.com] 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:Command and Conquer .. (Score:4, Interesting)
The core team from Westwood never left. They formed their own studio afterwards and continued to make RTS games.
Perhaps that's what everyone needs to do. Track down the old talent. See where they are hiding. Buy those games instead.
Re:Simple (Score:4, Interesting)
Very true, and very important. But since there will always be people who'd rather copy than buy, blaming it for the loss of sales is quite easy.
There is, in general and to my knowledge, five kinds of gamers.
1. The kind that will buy the game, no matter what. He wants to play that game, and he will jump through any hoop you make him, because it's HIS game and he WANTS it, and he is not interested or able to get it illegally (for whatever reason).
2. The kind that usually buys a game, but has no problem (neither technical, morally or otherwise) to use a crack if the game pisses him off enough that he decides a crack is the answer.
3. The kind that will buy a game if there's no way around it. He routinely uses copies and cracks when available, but if he has to buy a game he really wants, he will buy it.
4. The "activist" kind that will buy a game from any Indie company to "support them" but will copy anything with hardcore DRM to "stick it to the man", and failure to do so will make him do without the game to "make a point". Pretty much the opposite of 3.
5. The kind that will never buy a game, no matter what. If he can't get it as a copy, he'll simply not play it.
Of all those, only group 3 will be affected positively (from the game maker's point of view) with hardcore DRM. 1 and 2 buy the game anyway, 5 will not buy the game anyway and group 4 will be affected negatively by it. So what's left is whether group 3 or group 4 are bigger.
And while group 4 seems like a minimal tree-hugging fantasy group, you'd be surprised how big it can be once you factor in those people that want a game, see its DRM and/or reviews that point to it and abstain from it who also belong into this group of gamers.
Given the success of Indie games recently, I wouldn't say that group 3 is bigger than group 4 anymore.