Electronic Arts Wants To Be Voted Best Company In America

[Sniper Team 4]

I don't think that's possible. Just going through the comments on here, everyone wants EA to do different things, from Origin to game franchises. Bashing EA has become such a normal thing for gamers that they could become better than Valve in all ways and I'm positive people would still complain about them.
Nice that they're willing to change and do better though.

 

[Flutterbrave]

Come on, EA. At least *pretend* you aren't completely ignorant

 

[Sejborg]

"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."

So we weighed up the pros and cons and went, 'Okay. We will remove it.'

we weighed up the pros and cons

pros and cons

What pros EA? What were the pros? What?

Here's a tip for you EA. If you want to be voted the best company in USA, then stop being so mean all the time.

 

[synobal]

Ah EA I want a date with Jamie Alexander I bet I get a date with her before you get voted best company in america.

 

[Imperioratorex Caprae]

I'll second the sentiment that they don't deserve the Worst Company in America title, while being far from the best. Just goes to show how little gamers care about actual real world problems and instead concentrate their efforts on making teh 3vil game publishers pay for DRM...
Sigh.

 

[RJ Dalton]

You tried to be 'the best company in America' back in 2007 and we all know how that turned out.

Face it EA, you're a soulless bureaucratic nightmare devoted to making money whose schemes range from 'incompetent' to 'what the fuck were they thinking.'

I think aiming a little lower would be more realistic, like beating Activision and Ubisoft.

I meet your Spider-Man "you serious?" video and raise you the Futurama "Let me laugh even harder" video.

http://youtu.be/FopyRHHlt3M

Totally agree. Obviously every company wants to be thought of as the best company, but they've got a lot of fixing that needs being done if they're going to make that title. Though, honestly, I wish there'd be some damn perspective in this years "worst company" vote and maybe we elect Monsanto, or maybe the oil companies who are currently trying to push a bill through congress that requires people to pay a $5,000 fine to protest their practices in blatant violation of the right to free speech and peaceable assembly.

 

[Nocturnus]

They're moving in the right direction.

-Removal of the Online Pass, great.
-Raising millions of dollars for Charity using that Origin Bundle, great.
-Making Origin, arguably, a stronger and less intrusive program than Steam, great. (Sure, it needs a better catalogue and more sales, but the platform is pretty dang good.)
-Removing the CEO who screwed everything up? Yup.
-Staggering their launches a little more? Good.
-Continuing to support little companies like Funcom in their development of niche MMO's? Often overlooked, but yeah, it's there.

They're moving in the right direction, and I hope that continues. If it does, we have nothing to lose and everything to gain as gamers.

Maybe next we'll turn our attention to Activision... or has everyone already forgotten how they basicaly castrated near every dev team they have to make mass Call of Duty instalments and crappy movie games, while sucking the soul out of Blizzard Entertainment.

Seriously. EA Is nowhere near as bad as Kotick anymore.

 

[rasputin0009]

GET RID OF ORIGIN! Or at least make it so that I don't have to be online to play single-player games!

There's an offline mode. I can play Battlefield 3/4 Single Player offline no problem.

Baahahahahahahaha great now the only thing your going to have to do is scrap origin the most ridiculously draconian piece of DRM I have ever seen I was genuinely looking forward to battlefield 3 before you took a dump in punchbowl by adding origin to the party.

So you didn't buy BF3, a predominantly multiplayer game because EA wanted you to... *gasp*... go online? Even though you can play the single player offline? Huh. How 'bout that?

A better example of EA's DRM would be the new SimCity's constant multiplayer that shouldn't exist in a game like SimCity. That's something to get upset about. Even though I think it was just a poor design choice by Maxis that EA was definitely accepting of, but not something forced on by the publisher. Maxis is just as bad as EA when it comes to that situation.

Nothing has fucking changed. It's now a well-known fact that EA pushed Battlefield 4 out of the door despite knowing full-well it was NOWHERE NEAR ready for release, with the intention to beat CoD:Ghosts's launch by 1 week.
And I don't even know why the fuck a game like Battlefield would need to "compete" with a game like CoD, they cater to completely different audiences and do completely different things!

Definitely wasn't ready for release. Goddamn that netcode is awful. It's still not fixed, but it's better than it was the first 2 weeks. But Battlefield definitely competes with CoD over the same audience. They're both modern military multiplayer shooters. Each of them has its own merits, but they really are not "completely different".

 

[Rad Party God]

Good, good... now, can you revive Bullfrog?... no?... then you can't fix all of your mistakes.

 

[Barbas]

Well, they've said it before...before doing things like rushing Battlefield 4 through QA testing, that is. Still can't complete a single match from start to finish without crashing to the desktop. Their fate is pretty much sealed for the third year running.

So while we're at it, I'd like to be able to turn crap into gold with my mind.

 

[Callate]

Well, they say the first step is admitting you have a problem...

I don't know if they can pull it around; less, I don't know if they can make such a sweeping change and still have a profitable company. From a philosophical standpoint, it seems like virtually every big mis-step they've made comes from one very simple, and very horrible, conceit: the idea that their customer base was something to be controlled and corralled rather than courted. It didn't matter what people who enjoyed the SimCity series wanted, or Dead Space; it didn't matter that people were happier buying their games on Steam or from a brick-and-mortar store; it didn't matter how essential certain teams and team members were to the essence of a franchise. EA wanted to move into a particular market sector, wanted to make a little more profit off the top, wanted to shave a little off the bottom line, wanted to consolidate under one banner. And they said, over and over again, "We're doing this, and you're going to get in line and follow."

It's a relationship, EA. You can't just do what's right for you. You have to listen, not just talk, and when people talk, your first move can't be to your PR department trying to spin, minimize and trivialize people's criticisms and complaints. You can't play the martyr and claim to be the injured party when people try to tell you that what you're giving them isn't what they wanted. You didn't give it to them for free; they paid for it.

So pick this up, because it's yours, and you own it: You have earned some significant negative goodwill, if you will. To the point that even if you try to do something positive, people are going to give it second and third looks, trying to gauge your angle, wondering where the knife in the back is going to kick in. You're going to need to do some things because people like them, not just because it "optimizes your market penetration" or "sticks a toe in a competitive market" or increases the amount of user data you can pull. You may even have to eat some costs and reflect on profits measured in goodwill rather than black ink, playing the long game rather than finagling the Q3 report.

If you can do all that, I still wouldn't count on anyone voting you the best company in America, at least in the next couple of years. But maybe the Consumerist will give it to Chase or someone this year, instead.

 

[Battenberg]

And I want to be the king of all Londinium and wear a shiny hat, it ain't gonna happen.

Not for a few years at the very least, too much damage has been done to their name to fix it in any less time. I think the main thing they need to do is stop assuming customers are just mindless walking wallets who are prepared to throw any amount of cash at any old crap. Certain business practices of theirs, at least in my opinion, make it seem like they couldn't give less of a crap about customer satisfaction as long as the pennies are rolling in. There's no way that can be true of every person in the company and it would be nice to see them make an effort to acknowledge that, for a large portion of the world, it's a time of austerity as opposed to a time when it's ok to charge $100 to get a full game's worth of entertainment (e.g. Battfield 4 and the overly expensive season pass for the next gen).

It does sound like they're moving in the right direction though, not least by acknowledging that there is an issue instead of getting snarky with their customers.

 

[MrFalconfly]

"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."

So we weighed up the pros and cons and went, 'Okay. We will remove it.'

we weighed up the pros and cons

pros and cons

What pros EA? What were the pros? What?

Here's a tip for you EA. If you want to be voted the best company in USA, then stop being so mean all the time.

Eh. If you read the bit behind "Pros and cons" you'll probably come to the conclusions that there weren't that many pros.

 

[Shoggoth2588]

Well EA, you can start by releasing stuff to the Wii U again. We all know you had Crysis 3 ready to be copied to disc for instance. If you're going to continue to push unfinished games out the door though than never mind.

 

[Psychobabble]

Yeah yeah yeah. Once again EA claims they are just the wounded party who did things with the best intentions in mind. Sorry you pack of rats I'm not buying your line of pathetic bullshit, nor any of your products EVER. Every time one of these corporate monkeys speak all I hear is the I Can Change song from South Park the movie.

 

[Kroxile]

And people in Hell want ice water

Good Luck

 

[Chester Rabbit]

Well here's the thing EA you earned that award the last two years. You better start working towards that other award you are looking to get now.
Though I am pretty sure as far as gaming is concerned Microsoft is likely in everyone?s crosshair this year. At least the people who would be voting with gaming in mind...maybe.

 

[Seracen]

Didn't we get all this garbage PR pandering and nonsense back when John Ricetello became CEO? One year, he's saying how games need to get cheaper than $60. The next year, he's negatively recalling how at one time "the game you bought was the game you paid for."

Same old disingenuous song and dance we get every few years, in a futile attempt to convince us ANYTHING will change. I will never forgive EA for screwing up 5 years of my life with ME3.

On the bright side, reading the hilarious and deliciously vitriolic posts in this message forum make this almost troll-worthy press release worth it.

 

[Aeshi]

Why? It's not like you get anything for being voted "Best"