I'd post this as a response on there, but unfortunately they have a rather low character limit on comments. xD
First let me address your points regarding EA being voted "The Worst Company in America".
The site this Poll takes place on is called "The Consumerist", and the Poll is dedicated to companies that screw over consumers, not committing atrocities against mankind, because you are right EA wouldn't be among the final contestants in that case. BP won?t win awards for its clean business and the Bank of America is an American bank that did horrible things to the people indebted to them, but ultimately the peak of most people coming into contact with consumer practices in regards to BP is usually when they are upset because the gas prices went up again. And the Bank of America is the Bank of "America", while The Consumerist Poll is open to people Worldwide.
Another key difference is also that they offer replaceable goods. If someone doesn?t like BP they can go fill their gas tank at a Shell or Exxon petrol station or at various other competitors of their choosing and their car will still work just fine.
If people don?t like a bank they can always switch, in most cases even transfer debt if there?s evidence of being able to pay it off.
If people want to play games published by EA though, which are unique as products, they can?t get them from anywhere else, and they?re forced to suffer from EAs overall practices against its consumers. If you like games, or want games by certain developers like BioWare, Maxis or Visceral you are forced to put up with those or go without.
For instance in the case of Sim City, there could have been near to a million ticked off consumers that weren?t able to play the game for the first week or two and were directly affected by these practices. Amazon.com has over 3000 1-star user reviews alone [http://www.amazon.com/SimCity-Limited-Edition-Pc/product-reviews/B007FTE2VW/], a lot of them by ?Amazon Verified Purchasers? so you know these are YOUR consumers complaining about YOU. Those are people that actively took the time of day and wrote entire paragraphs (and initiated in dialogue) over how bad the game and especially your practices in regards to it are.
At the end of the day, what do you think would have happened if BP or Bank of America would?ve won another award for how badly they are operating their business? They wouldn?t even have released any kind of statement to acknowledge their win and there likely wouldn?t have been any kind of reaction at all. People are at least hoping to get a reaction and admittance out of EA, and maybe, possibly change some of the things it does.
________________________________________________
That Sim City's Always Online Requirement isn't "DRM" is a blatant lie and you know that, many of your consumers (especially on the PC side of things) are rather proficient with technical skills and work in IT or as programmers themselves, you should know that you can't pull the wool over their eyes.
The features and the requirements of a game deign if it should carry the ?MMO? genre brand and not marketing buzzwords or type of DRM employed.
Sim City was always decidedly Single Player and the new one isn't much different, it's just a new breed of single player game that has a built in DRM limiting its use-cases and deigning it to a designed obsolescence as soon as the sequel comes out. It?s a bad precedent and has to be stopped lest more and more decidedly Single Player games do the same thing and then possibly ?disappear? forever at some point when server upkeep doesn't prove profitable anymore or out of whatever other reason, while people can still play Sim City 2000 from 20 years ago without a problem.
Let?s examine the meaning of the word ?MMO? as it pertains to Sim City?
MASSIVE(LY) ?> Usually means more than 128 people (often much more) and with a persistent world, Battlefield for instance had 64×64 player maps and soldier persistency mechanics for a long while and it?s still ?only? considered a Multiplayer game (and also always had its Single Player part in being able to play against Bots or the campaign). In the case of Sim City there are regions that people can play in either alone, or share cities with a rather (low) number of other people, usually 2-6 other people, but only 4 seem to be able to interconnect properly at one time.
MULTIPLAYER ?> Should be a little more than a few values you could unmarshal/marshal from/into a simple file. You can play alone in Sim City, there isn?t even a ?Co-Op Mode? for two player city building or anything like that, which would require Multiplayer. All new features could be developed as an (optional) Multiplayer mode and everyone would have been happy.
Regions and sharing/trading resources aren?t a new thing, Sim City 4 from 2003 already had those with its Regional Gameplay [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimCity_4#Regional_gameplay].
As far as I know there were even people playing it in ?Multiplayer? like the new Sim City that way by simply synching a few of the State/Save-files amongst each other using DropBox, for instance there are people on SimTropolis doing this [http://community.simtropolis.com/topic/40240-simcity-4-multiplayer-mode/].
There is also a big difference between ?Synchronous Multiplayer Games? (what MMOs are using where people run around with each other, form groups or raids and appear with hundreds of other people in a common town or area and states are updated instantaneously to transmit the new positional data based on ping latency from clients to server) and ?Asynchronous Multiplayer Games? like Sim City where you can play all by your lonesome, building your city not much minding what other people do, even if they are Offline at the moment and then they get to see what you did when they log in next and get to do the same.
The only mechanism required for this is a asynchronous way to push/pull and merge that data at given intervals depending on how the players want to, e.g. every hour/day/week or whatever may be deemed appropriate. Instead EA/Maxis made it all just worse, by requiring an Always-Online connection even if you are playing alone (which most people are likely doing).
ONLINE ?> Yep, forced ?Always-Online DRM?.
Sim City, even with its new design is still a decidedly Single Player game (that could make use of an OPTIONAL Multiplayer Mode which would only need to synch State files with a master server every time in a period of X hours/minutes or even multiple days if the player chooses so, no need to be Always Online for it), your own engineers have said so themselves.
You keep repeating that the game is an "MMO", trying to get people to buy that. This whole thing would have been half as bad if you just admitted to the DRM instead of outright lying and trying to deflect from the issues, but that isn't EAs usual policy.
_________________________________________
Your company has been going around devouring developers and draining them of all their creativity for around two decades now, about as many years as you have treated your customers as walking, talking wallets and not much else. You have been at the forefront of DLC and Day-1 DLC as a money-gouging practice, Microtransactions, using viral marketing to change public perception, trying to influence the press, trying to prevent used sales with Online Passes, various kinds of consumer-scorning DRM methods, lately even Always-Online DRM.
You refer to Microtransactions as a "consumer choice", yet your previous CEO referred to them as consumer exploitation at points in time when players "aren't price sensitive":
Your sports games only sell the way they do because you have acquired and are basically hoarding the exclusive rights to about any existing league out there, from the NFL, NBA, FIFA, UEFA to the NHL and more. Principal thing being to have no competition as you know that a quasi-monopolistic position in the market is the best position to be in and games aren't considered "serious business" just yet anyway, despite making more money than movies and music do in large parts of the world.
These practices are considered and methodical unlike oil spills or the financial crisis (which I am sure even BP and big banks didn't WANT to happen, but came to be from negligence).
I'd also like to remind you of the "EA Spouse" incident [http://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html], that described how EA deals with some of its valued employees, there's talk of 7-day work weeks and 85-90 hours of work in those, of deteriorating families and other nasty things, and if a game slightly underperforms you don't seem as considerate about their livelihoods and cut their jobs to "maximize profits".
You also aren't above cutting peoples jobs and re-hiring them in their desperation just as a bonus was due, benefits would kick in or because you want your quarterly figures to look good, or at least weren't above it in the past.
Your EULA forbids people to sue you if they have disagreements, you take the rights to collect personal data of your consumers for yourself and use it whatever way you want and having the right to terminate any purchase agreement and taking away products out of any reason whatsoever, just because they want to play some games.
In other industries, trying to talk customers into believing that they don't actually "own" the products they buy with their money or trying to completely prevent used sales would be considered ludicrous, yet when your company does it, it seems to be fine since it's "only about video games", you are also shifting the lion share of your profits to marketing-based "Pre-Order" hype more and more, since actually knowing if a game is good or bad before buying it might be bad for business after all...
It is also telling, that yet again you are using the LBTGQ community as nothing but a shield to hide behind whenever you make mistakes, you have done so already for Dragon Age 2, you have done it in various occasions for Star Wars: The Old Republic, you have done it against the criticism levied against Mass Effect 3 in the beginning days till the mountain grew too big (which wasn't only about the ending, but also about employing Origin as DRM, important plot-based Day-1 DLC and many other things), you have done it with Sim City recently and more importantly you have already done it the last time around you were voted the "Worst Company in America" and were even called out on it by publications like Forbes [http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2012/04/05/ea-in-full-damage-control-mode-points-to-anti-gay-hate-mail/]. People aren't really buying it anymore.
It constitutes a really low PR tactic and people appreciate it less and less the more you make use of it. We know that EA has even dabbled in hiring fake religious protesters to promote their games (Dante's Inferno) and that the company isn't above this.
Enough is enough and there is also another tree-related proverb that I'd like to bring up: "The bigger they are, the harder they fall."
