Electronic Arts Wants To Be Voted Best Company In America

[EclipsiumRasa]

Patrick Soderlund of Electronic Arts says being voted "Worst Company in America" two years in a row forced it to step back and reconsider what it was doing.

They were voted the "Worst Company in America", twice. THEN they began reconsidering their actions? Am I being too cynical here, but isn't this the sort of thing a company ought to begin reconsidering LONG BEFORE said company even becomes a contendor for "Worst Company in America", first time around?

Electronic Arts set a new high in lows earlier this year when it was overwhelmingly chosen as the worst company in America [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/123161-Electronic-Arts-Repeats-as-Worst-Company-in-America] in a Consumerist poll, the first, and so far only, time that a company has repeated as the "winner." It's obviously a silly distinction and more a reflection of the pool of respondents than of any particular evil committed by EA, but Soderlund, the executive vice president of EA Studios, said it stung nonetheless.

Hang on, why's it obviously a silly distinction? If the method for choosing it is obviously silly, then call me stupid and explain it to me. Maybe its a bit melodramatic or arbitrary (cigarette companies make products that, used correctly by the purchasers cause lung cancer, fine), but even still spell it out.

"I don't believe for a second that we are the worst company in America, but I do believe when something like that happens, you have to sit down and ask yourselves, 'Why are people saying these things?'," he told MCV. "We did that and we started to realize that we are doing things that people don't like."

Denial. Do we have a PR concerns? "Profits are fine, do we really need to address this crap?" Forget any doubts about cynicism I had earlier.

"We looked at something as simple as the Online Pass," he continued. "People were telling us they didn't like that. So we weighed up the pros and cons and went, 'Okay. We will remove 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."

Faltered a bit in the past? You don't get singled out for this Golden Raspberry of company notoriety for faltering a bit in the past. You get it for dual outstanding achievements pissing people off and doing anything and everything that could raise your market share.

Soderlund said it's inevitable that EA will make mistakes but suggested that the plan going forward will be a simple one: acknowledge that a mistake was made, and then fix it. That's easy to say and doesn't mean much without action to back it up, but the long-term goal is to "earn people's trust and respect."

Platitude: mistakes are inevitable.
Execuspeak: "the plan going forward will be a simple one." "The long term goal"

This is a plan, but putting a band aid on a leper whilst giving a speech about how serious you take healthcare is a plan too.

"We don't want to be bad, we have no desire to be voted the worst company in America," Soderlund said. "On the contrary, we want to be voted the best."

NOTE:

The long term goal isn't "to be voted the best"

Consider: "earn people's trust and respect" doesn't force you to change how you do business. "Bread and circuses earns back people's trust and respect. Whereas making a long term goal to be "voted the best company in America?" THAT forces you to change everything. It forces EA to refuse to make a profitable produce if it won't make people think: "THIS is better than anything else I could have spent my money on." No more cookie cutter sequels or rip-offs or riding roughshod over its employees quality of life at crunch time. To hell with that.

Bread. Circuses. Resume business as usual.

 

[Groxnax]

Dudes, what are you all smoking over there?

 

[Sindwiller]

Alright, i'll bite. From a few posters above me.

[ ] Stop treating your paying customers like criminals and remove your B.S. DRM.

-Good idea. Thankfully, they've started in this direction. We'll see if they continue, though.

[ ] Stop buying up dying companies and gutting them

Activision, sadly, is worse in this sense. How many studios have been gutted to make CoD? Way too many. But this practice in general is kinda crappy.

To EA's credit, though, they continue to support smaller studios like FunCom in their development of Niche MMO's like "The Secret World", which is a diamond in the rough.

[ ] Fix your quality control standards

SimCity? Yeah...

[ ] No more on-disc DLC. EVER.

Agree.

[ ] Remove microtransactions for anything except DLC characters/expansions.

Not just a fault of EA. This seems to be an industry issue, now.

[ ] Get rid of Origin requirements for games. In fact, get rid of Origin entirely. Nobody's going to use it in its current state.

In favor of what... Steam? I think i've posted this more times than I care to count, but it really is no secret that Valve takes 30% off the top of every sale that it makes just for having it on Steam itself. They don't have to do anything other than have it for sale there. Why wouldn't a company want to put together their own alternative to sell their games and keep their money? 30% is a LOT.

That, and Origin, as a platform, is stronger than Steam. May not have the catalogue or sales that Steam has, but as a program, it's coded much, much better.

[ ] Cut down on your bloated advertising budget. Seriously.

Ugh. I hate this. Even companies as awesome as Bethesda spend a lot of money on stupid TV Spots.

[ ] Give your workers reasonable timeframes for finishing games so we don't have more rush jobs.

Again, another industry standard.

[ ] STOP USING PUNKBUSTER FOR ALL OF YOUR PC GAMES. Seriously. STOP.

In games as competetive as Battlefield, how does the industry curtail cheating though? There aren't many other solutions out there that can be easily uninstalled and what not.

Where is the source that steam takes 30%? Hell, how is that different from XBl, PSN, or any store ever?

In fact, consoles are worse because you have to be milked dry so the consoles can make their money back.

and lastly, dedicated servers prevent cheaters. Dedicated servers have admins, not punkbuster which was PROVEN to be useless years ago, causing more problems than solutions.

Which is why dedicated servers are demanded, if the players don't control servers then its up to a fallible easily gamed system.

Hell, punkbuster doesn't recognize all hacks, it only recognizes old ones. A human admin can recognize a hack regardless of what code it uses. Because its visible.

And by the way, steam wasn't the one trying to lock down games. Steam doesn't care if you sell elsewhere. It was EA that had a shit fit when steam asked for its DLC to be sold there too.

EA walked away from steam, not the other way around. Steam isn't the one locking down games.

Google it. But, just in case, this is straight from the Escapist, regarding Notch putting Minecraft on Steam.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/7.383139-Notch-in-No-Hurry-to-Bring-Minecraft-to-Steam

And... yeah, they pulled their stuff from Steam. Again, the PC is not a closed ecosystem. With that, publishers and companies can say: No, Valve, i'm not paying letting you have 30% of every sale of every game I sell. I will keep that 30%, thank you very much. Thus, Origin.

Think about it: Every game that sells for $60.00 on Steam, $18.00 goes to Valve. Every One Million in sales? 300 grand to Valve. Just for having it on Steam. Any honest company would say: We have no reason to sacrifice 300 grand when we can design a non-intrusive platform, and Origin in its current incarnation is just that.

And quite frankly, that's healthy. I would hate to see Steam continue to be the only place that people can buy games, and will hope that more competition continues to open.

You do know that 30% mark up is average right now right? Even in physical stores? Stores will charge that regardless.

and origin is non intrusive? Have you seen their platform? Everything is social networking this and micro transactions that.

EA thinks its customers are the scum of facebook, they think the only reason they exist is to broadcast their lives and have stated so. They don't respect their customers.

Steam never popped up demanding 4.99 for a microtransaction in the way EA does. Steam never popped up a huge box asking to "post to my friends."

That's why origin exists. Its an evolved version of their old DRM and microtransaction system dating all the way back to the Dragon Age 1 era.

The only reason origin exists is to nickel and dime you and to make sure it only goes 1 way. Not for alternatives. Not for market competition.

PC has plenty of competition. Steam and origin aren't the only ones. EA left EVERY alternative to make sure it can try to nickel and dime you at every turn. They even came out and said that sales "cheapen" the IP.

Trying to hoard games on a store YOU OWN so you get ALL the POWER is the opposite of competition. Even then, the money you "saved" from steam is lost in the cost of setup and the cost of operation. Server farms aren't cheap/

Even though sales is what steam makes its main money from. Not regular price games.

And lack of competition? We have fucking plenty. Origin isn't the only one. Its only there to get money out of you in the most obvious way possible.

The fact is, you are so wrong I am beginning to wonder if you even play PC games at all. EA isn't there to enforce competition, its there to dominate everything so it can wring all the money out of your pockets with huge price tags. EA is not your friend, and it sure as hell isn't creating compeitition.

Its just holding all its games hostage. Its there to force consumers follow EA's rules.

Its even trying this crap with the PS4 for christ sakes.

Even if it were on Steam, Valve does not control the prices of the games that are there, nor whether or whether not they are on sale. That is on the publisher, IE: EA.

I get it. You like Steam. I like Steam too, and I have all but two to three of my games there. But i'm not blind enough to understand that companies will try to maximize the amount of money they make off of their products. They're not the only ones, either. Nintendo locks their stuff down on their hardware. Ubisoft requires uPlay. Amazon has a games client now, which i've used. GameStop, much the same. Valve has helped create a radically popular niche for itself in PC Gaming, and now that people are here, businesses are saying: Hey, I don't have to use Valve to sell my games anymore. Unless it's a SteamBox, PC Games are not restricted to a closed ecosystem. Any program can be installed to manage gaming software, and companies are understandably attempting to keep that large sum of cash to themselves.

Server farms and software development in trade for long term fiscal saliance is also a no brainer, especially if they get people into their ecosystem who like it.

Have I seen their platform? Yes. I own games on their platform. I've bought games on their platform: Mass Effect 3, The Sims 3, SimCity, and Battlefield 3. It's just as easy to buy games there as it is on Steam, and i've never been prompted for any social networking plugins or anything related. As a matter of fact, if I were to compare the two side by side strictly in terms of their coding, Origin is more modern, loads faster, and uses fewer system resources than Steam does. It installs quicker, doesn't insist on a DirectX install for every game, and has a "lite" client to run offline for games that don't require a full internet connection to run.

Steam is old. The way it handles games dates back to Windows XP/Vista, as Steam Games don't even recognize the taskbar. It takes a long time to load up, its first time installations require install of programs that are native to Windows Vista, 7, and 8, and it uses quite a bit of memory while shopping. It's clunky between pages, and its navigation is dated.

Both collect usage data, and both exist to be DRM for their respective games.

This isn't to say that it's bad. It does what it's intended to do, and the prices are hard to beat when it chooses to run a sale. I do wish Valve would actually update their client, though, to something more modern. I know that they have the money to do so. Instead, they are choosing to build an operating system that closes off those who run it to Valve's ecosystem. Oh well.

Despite all that, though, Valve's catalogue and sales are extremely difficult to beat. It's one of the reasons being a PC Gamer is so great: Where XBox and Playstation are running new games at high prices, I get them stupidly cheap. Origin, while having its Black Friday sales and some pretty competetive offers, can't beat Steam's catalogue.

But is Origin bad? No. Would I expect more companies to move in that direction? Yup. Do I blame them? Nope, and I think that as PC Gaming grows, Valve is likely to lose its vice grip on the PC Gaming market as more various locations open to sell games to us. Microsoft, for example, is positioning itself to enter the market, as they have the guy who made Steam the program it is today on their team to build a client of their own to sell games.

For the record, I've been PC Gaming for 14 years, and console gaming for more than a decade before that. Just because I don't have this overwhelming vitriol for Origin doesn't mean that "i don't PC Game." It just means that I have not found the reason to be upset at a company I haven't done much business with, and when I have, it hasn't been the end of the world.

Me liking steam? Is that your only rebuttal? Let me put this into simple terms:

Steam doesn't try to force consumers into its rules. It allows outside sales.

Uplay is just the multiplayer part of Ubisoft games, Ubisoft DID NOT hoard all its games.

Origin is meant to hoard games from OTHER services, and is filled with anti consumer practices.

Good old games.

Even gamefly.

The list goes on.

There is a difference. There is no defending Origin. At all.

The steambox is LINUX. A closed system? Its a free open source OS made by a man who hates big business. Anything that runs on linux will run on the steambox. There is no closed system because of its open source status.

If you're going to try to criticize Linux, at least know basic facts about it.

And not hating origin isn't what I meant. You said steam was the only way to buy PC games. That is false. You implied origin is the only competition and helps competition, that is also false.

And now you say Linux is a closed system, which is false.

And origin is meant to be anti competitive. That is the very definition of bad, even by your own Logic that you apply to steam.

Not even steam and Uplay take anti-competition to Origin's level. That is what makes origin bad. That is what makes origin a danger to consumer rights.

Linux BASED. SteamOS is Linux BASED, meaning that it's built on TOP OF the Linux Platform. It's not just Linux running Steam. It's an operating system using Linux's code as its basic operating procedures.

You know what else is running Linux based operating systems? MacOS X. Video game consoles. iOS. Other phones. You name it. I don't even need to get into how closed Apple based systems are. Just because it's based on Linux doesn't wave some magic wand and produce wildly open results. It depends on how the system is coded. And with that, Valve is not a charity. If you believe that they're going to allow other systems for digital distribution of games onto that platform, you're delusional.

*sigh* There are a few corrections that need to be done to that statement before you people proceed.

a) SteamOS is not just "Linux-based", it's basically a Linux distribution with Steam pre-installed. What is a distribution you ask? Well, it's a bundle of software that complements and effectively turns the naked Linux kernel into a full-fledged operating system with a shell, a graphical display software, a desktop environment, and whatnot. SteamOS will be just that - a Linux distribution just like Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Fedora etc., but unlike any of those in that it is meant to be used on console-ish gaming hardware and that Valve is probably going to throw some complementary apps into the mix. In the end, however, you'll be able to do what you want with the operating system and the hardware it runs on. That is partly because of the nature of Linux and its license, for further reading consult this article [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPL].

b) OS X is not based on Linux, nor is it running the Linux kernel (which would have had horrific consequences for Apple, see the GPL). OS X is a Unix-like operating system. Linux just happens to be a Unix-like OS as well. POSIX-complaince and whatnot. OS X's kernel, however, was originally based on code from FreeBSD [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeBSD], NextStep [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NextStep] and other projects - and of course Apple code, too. The underlying stuff is similar, but it's not Linux.

c) iOS -> see b)

d) What video game console is running Linux?

e) Android is running the Linux Kernel underneath, though heavily modified with huge chunks of closed-source proprietary code including the drivers which (I think) is loaded through a binary loading interface -- blah blah. But that's not what SteamOS is/will be.