PROMISES PROMISES
After EA came out of nowhere to win the WCIA title last year, it first tried to shrug off the victory by pointing out that some of the previous Golden Poo winners may have been worse, like a bratty adolescent who uses examples of worse kids in the neighborhood to get out of being punished by his parents. EA failed to realize that there may be more than a few different ways to merit a Worst Company crown.
Then later in the year, it seemed to realize that maybe it should do something to suck a little less, with the head of customer service foretelling a “drastic shift in the company.” That message didn’t seem to get around to everyone, as EA’s CFO ticked off much of the gaming community by talking about the importance and predicted omnipresence of microtransactions — in-game purchases for add-on content — in every EA game. He eventually backtracked on his own words, saying he only meant that microtransactions would be part of every free-to-play game.
EA then picked the absolute worst time possible to screw up the release of the eagerly anticipated SimCity 5, encompassing almost every reason so many gamers hate the company.
First, though it’s still produced under the Maxis brand, that name means nothing anymore as Maxis has been owned by EA for more than a decade. Then there is the requirement that SimCity users must be connected to the Internet in order to play, which many claim — in spite of EA’s repeated denials — is a blatant, crippling attempt to fight piracy at the expense of consumers’ convenience or privacy.
Additionally, this always-online requirement highlights another common complaint about EA — that it rushes titles out before they are ready for the market. The company itself has admitted that it wasn’t prepared to for all the people who would, heaven forbid, want to actually play the game they just bought.
In its defense of the always-online issue, EA actually mentioned microtransactions — one of the very things that gamers hate about the company — as a positive reason for not allowing offline play.
As the WCIA nominations poured in, EA bragged about all the copies of SimCity had been sold, glossing over the fact that lots of those people weren’t able to play. Let’s not forget that CEO John Riccitiello stepped down from his gig in the middle of all this.
Then, just as EA’s margins of victory were beginning to get slimmer, company COO Peter Moore decides it’s a good time to issue a “we can do better” message… a message that goes out of its way to deflect criticism, going so far as to claim that a bizarre, right-wing homophobic conspiracy is really the underlying reason for EA’s inclusion in this year’s tournament. That, and people who were mad about the cover of Madden NFL. Funny that none of the many, many readers who nominated EA this year mentioned either of these things.