Can they do better? If so, why aren't they, and how do they propose to do so? Nice to see they realize that everyone hates them... Now if only they'd provide something other than useless rhetorical spin. Good example of how NOT to run a company.
They could've "done better" by actually saying what they will do to improve things. This was an absolutely atrocious PR piece. It didn't address any of the issues people were having.
"45 million registered users are proving them wrong."
Such a goofy and useless statistic. When you require registration for your products, that doesn't mean people are satisfied users of your service, it means you got a lot of people to sign up. It's not an accurate metric for how many people actually enjoy and use the service.
Continuing...
"Some people think that free-to-play games and micro-transactions are a pox on gaming. Tens of millions more are playing and loving those games."
Again: just because you have a bunch of people willing to pay you money for your crap, doesn't mean it isn't crap and you couldn't be doing better.
This sort of defense mechanism doesn't even address the problems people are having. It's almost insulting to everyone who does, legitimately, have a gripe with EA as a company. Those folks angry with EA's principles, games, or for simply not getting the value of what they paid are being cast aside.
It's extremely obvious they're less concerned with addressing issues and more concerned with telling everyone about how many users they have or what their sales are:
"But here’s the truth: each year EA interacts with more than 350 million gamers; Origin is breaking records for revenue and users; The Simpsons: Tapped Out and Real Racing 3 are at the top of the mobile charts; Battlefield 3 and FIFA are stunning achievements with tens of millions of players; and SimCity is being enjoyed by millions of passionate fans all over the world."
It seems possible to paraphrase the entirety of this press release: "We recognize a lot of people hate us, but hey, we've got a lot of other people paying us who aren't you, so we can't be that wrong, can we?"
I am not quite sure but I think it might be along the lines of the fact EA cannibalizes so many studios. If you are a fan of a certain game series and then EA comes in and buys the studio that makes it or the rights to it you are still going to try out the next release of the game. The problem is that EA ruins it almost every single time from what I have heard. You can say that people should know that is going to happen due to their reputation but people will always have hope that it will be different just this time.
The same reason why people are customers of TicketMaster, BofA, Comcast, or many of the companies competing for Worst Company in America: While EA doesn't have a whole monopoly on their market, they are an unignorable player.
People hate TicketMaster but they aren't willing to forego a concert to voice their opinion. People hate BofA but they don't know about the great alternatives they have in credit unions. People hate comcast, but sometimes it's the only ISP available. Similarly, EA touches on all of these fronts.
Because on the whole they publish some very good games, even the most staunch EA detractor can admit that. The vocal minority isn't an accurate representation of the millions that buy EA games (and they publish some of the most popular games you can buy, particularly their sports franchises like FIFA & Madden).
There's a limited number of people who can publish a AAA title. EA is one of those few.
Further, EA's strategy of late has been to acquire IP to which gamers have already developed a sentimental attachment. So you may hate EA, but you really love Commander Shepard, so you do what you gotta do to keep hanging out with her.
EA has a LOT of money to throw at games. They're one of the few publishers that can play at that level and put out blockbuster, ridiculous budget games. People like the polish and shine of big-budget games, some of which are genuinely not possible with less money.
Unfortunately, there's also an aspect that consumers don't get a whole lot of choices. Movies are a decent comparison to that. Why are there so many bad sequels that everyone hates? Cause they still buy tickets. Any movie > no movie.
EA still does make great games, sometimes. Their problems tend to be more toward customer-hostile actions (see: SimCity, the myriad Origin customer service horror stories, the letter that spawned this thread) and their tendency to eat smaller studios that were fan favorites before their acquisition (BioWare, Maxis, and so on). That last one is important to understand the vitriol thrown at the company, I think; it's a bit galling to see a franchise like SimCity, that touched so many people's childhoods (like mine), become the joke that it has.
IP mostly, for example, SimCity (2013) was the first (complete) iteration of the venerable series in 10 years. A lot of people (including myself) were interested in an improvement on games we played as kids and teens back with the first SimCity. The marketing, information and videos released ahead of the game indicated a solid and fun game. Fun enough to warrant at least putting up with an always online experience. To me the biggest issue isn't ultimately the online aspect (while I disagree with it, if it really bothered me I wouldn't have bought it.) The big issue is that for a game with a history of reflectively deep simulation and gameplay, this one falls on it's head hard. I've put a few hours into it, the only challenge in the game is fighting against things that are essentially design issues/bugs, not in the challenge of managing a complex and changing city.
Anyways, this is the first EA game I've bought for myself since SimCity 4, first time I actually installed their platform Origin. Actually that points to the interesting reality, the people who buy these games may be simply purchasing a gift.
To be fair, people werent exactly happy when they had to sign into Steam to play HalfLife2 in 2004 either. Times are different i know, but people tend to forget that Steam was forced upon us in quite similar ways and really wasnt everyones darling like it is today.
I think the disconnect there is that Half Life 2 was a superb achievement in gaming, and worth the investment of dealing with Steam (arguably, Counter-Strike 1.6 started the Steam train, though, and Team Fortress 2 keeps it chugging). If EA gave us a Half Life 2 of its own that required Origin, they might pull it off.
I can't think of one, which is telling. SimCity had the potential to be and, well, wasn't.
The title that required me to install Origin first was Battlefield 3 and thats a pretty awesome game by every measure, if you are into these kind of big budget military shooters that is.
I wouldn't have cared about Origin if it wasn't for a few provisions in their licensing agreement that made me very nervous. In particular the bits about letting them scan your whole hard drive (Steam's only lets them scan the folders it writes to) and the provision they added about "You can't sue us, but we can sue you." While other services have the latter one, having it in conjunction with the former really gave me a huge big brother vibe. I wouldn't have used it with the first one anyway as that's intrusive enough, but the second just made it worse.
In it, they specifically say that the exemptions from this non-lawsuit clause are related to copyright (big claims) and small claims court. Since most users aren't likely to own copyright or patents, I call that stacking the deck of available actions.
Valve has since proven itself, though. EA has done the opposite. If Valve disappointed people as consistently as EA does, people would still hate Steam — but instead Valve has made it the most unobtrusive DRM scheme known to man.
I think they aren't very happy today, too. I believe the registration itself is bad customer experience, be it with Origin, U-play or Steam.
I've bough^W licensed a DRM-encumbered game. Well, that happens. Just silently create me a nameless account behind the scenes without bothering me with forms and whatever. Tie it to PC and in case of reinstalls or multiple devices let me authenticate by entering CD key or whatever proof-of-purchase's available and then ask to create a password.
Meanwhile, just lure me to social hub or store with a menu option(s). If I'll find the service useful, I'll eventually fill out the details. If I won't - no reason to care about me anyway, as I won't use the service I don't like unless it's really enforced upon.
Nope. Got a game, but have to fill out forms. They want an email confirmation, secret question, obligatory CAPTCHA, cumbersome launcher software and whatever.
That was the case in 2004, yes, but now people look forward to getting their games on Steam. The value added by the Steam client is enough to get people to choose games on the Steam platform, as opposed to direct downloads from Amazon or the developer-- in fact, most of those come with optional Steam keys anyways because loading your purchased game into the Steam system is worthwhile enough to do in and of itself. I think the most telling point here is that Valve has only had a handful of it's own games drop-- Portal, HL, L4D, CS, and TF2 are the 5 that come to mind, and that's over 9 years-- compared to the number of IPs that EA binds to Origin, and yet people still choose to load their 3rd-party games into the Steam client.
Origin, on the other hand, is coming into the market as an underdog entry from a hated company with a history of decommissioning game's DRM and multiplayer servers within a couple years of the game's release. While they've only had 2 years in the market to Steam's near-decade, unless Origin manages to come up with significantly more value added to the client itself, their IP is going to be their sole draw.
Actually I still dislike Steam and avoid that too. Generally I will buy a non-steam version of a game if it is available.
I don't want my computer to take longer to boot up or to run slower in case I want to play a game so I don't have Steam set to start automatically.
This means that if I want to play a Steam game (I have a couple like Portal) I must first wait for Steam to open up, get internet, log in (oh so slowly) and finally it will think about opening my game. However undoubtedly there's been an update and so steam will decide to install this first. All in all I'm bored by the time the Valve logo pops up and the actual game can start loading. Or you know, I could just pirate the game and it would open straight away without the need for Steam.
So in short, Steam is also horrible and forced. But at least they make better games and have something like customer support.
Free mobile games such as Simpsons tapped out require you to signup to origin to interact with anyone else. That is a ton of people with origin accounts that have never paid a cent for anything and also haven't visited it outside of a mobile game.
Whereas I have a steam account with a heap of paid for games. So in both cases I contribute to the total user count, dollars spent though is completely different.
> Again: just because you have a bunch of people willing to pay you money for your crap, doesn't mean it isn't crap and you couldn't be doing better.
Personally I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with F2P games with micro transactions. I feel Riot has created a great F2P game with League of Legends. Micro transactions are only used for non-essential stuffs (for example skins for your heroes or to "buy" heroes quicker then possible by the normal "grind").
For the rest I agree with your opinion. And with regards to SimCity, I really feel they should change the game to make the always-online functionality not required. Sooner or later the services will go down and in the current state the game will be useless.
I actually didn't have any issue with the micro gaming or F2P structure. I completely agree with you in regards to Riot. I was actually just mentioning it as another example of the PR piece simply saying: "but we've got a whole bunch of other people paying for it, so we can't be that wrong."
I agree 100% to your points.
This is incredible how aggressive this post is, literally saying how stupid we are for not liking what EA do and how wrong we are.
No explanation on what they are going to do, and argumentation worst than an 8th grader "LOL WE HAVE PEOPLE ON ORIGIN SO ITS BETTER THAN STEAM"
no it's not, I play BF3 and wished it was on steam and not origin.
I mean, I PLAYED, because, it's so full of bugs and a pain in the ass just to launch a game with my friends, I never gave them money for the addons...
> It's extremely obvious they're less concerned with addressing issues and more concerned with telling everyone about how many users they have or what their sales are:
All of it can be interpreted this way: this PR piece isn't meant to address customer concerns -- it's meant to address shareholder concerns.
That is a great assessment of the PR piece. It made me realize that my anger with EA for some of the ways I feel they've changed the gaming industry may have caused me to take it a bit too personally.
As someone who was an avid gamer, I felt like the statement was addressed to gamers. But, you may be more correct in saying it was for shareholders anyway.
I'm not sure what your expectations are of a PR piece...do you want to see EA's KPI dashboard and development roadmap? Shareholders don't even see that, so why should you? And to be fair, I think a specific thing they mentioned was giving away SimCity for free to 900k users, that's not trivial.
I actually really appreciated the honesty of this piece because I think it shows some integrity on EA's part to be willing to admit fault. How many companies have driven themselves into irrelevance and destruction by thinking they were right every time?
I don't think it's worth talking down their numbers either, consumers vote with their wallets. If you really though a product was crap, you'd find something else, otherwise there's clearly something of quality there that keeps you coming back.
I work in the newer side of the games industry and see in painful detail how far EA has to go to catch up with recent trends and regain their dominance in the marketplace, but as someone who's also had my fair share of memorable experiences from EA games, I'm pulling for them.
when you're misquoting people to make your point, maybe something is wrong with your argument. BTW I have no connection to EA and don't think I own any EA games.
When you assume there was malicious intent in misquoting someone, maybe you should check to see if it was intentional or not before attacking their entire argument. I edited my comment for accuracy, but it doesn't make it any less valid.
> This is the same poll that last year judged us as worse than companies responsible for the biggest oil spill in history, the mortgage crisis, and bank bailouts that cost millions of taxpayer dollars.
Thing is, customers don't have a love-affair with the products of those other companies. We do with EA's products at their best. A great game is a treasure, personal, forming great experiences and memories in almost the same way a child or puppy does.
So when a game maker fails so epically, betrays their customers so thoroughly and completely, it tends to spark a serious reaction. A reaction more akin to a friend betraying you and selling you out.
As for oil spills: I can envision how that might happen through mere incompetence and laziness. I have more trouble envisioning how EA can do what they've been doing through mere incompetence; it's far more baffling than that.
"Many continue to claim the Always-On function in SimCity is a DRM scheme. It’s not. People still want to argue about it. We can’t be any clearer – it’s not. Period."
He's flat out lying. I have no interest whatsoever in what he is saying. SimCity can technically run offline, gamers want to run it offline, but EA won't let you run it offline because you could then pirate their software. They should just demonstrate some courage and admit it.
I think I believe them: the game they wanted to make was one where the "continuous, integrated online world" was integral to the way people played SimCity: only the final product didn't do enough to justify their original intention.
But it is not a question about "belief" (unless you extrapolate that to mean future actions). SimCity has been hacked to demonstrate its completely offline nature.
I've no doubt that it can run like that (and given SimCity works for ~30 mins or so without connecting to SimCity's servers, it's no shock to anybody who actually played the game at launch); but that doesn't mean that their intent when conceiving of the game wasn't for the online aspect to be utterly central and integral to how they wanted people to play the game. The always online "requirement" could absolutely have resulted from that desire rather than DRM.
If it was just a matter of DRM, then it's plain inconsistent with how they're approaching DRM with every other PC release they've done recently.
And even if he's not - he should concede this point. There's no winning for EA if they continue to argue this, consumers have already made up their mind about it. They should cut their losses and own up to the SimCity debacle.
Lying - maybe not. It sure works like a DRM scheme. But EAs position to this has always been "we did it for the social interactions, and to make simCity possible by computing things on our servers!" (sure, that last part was a lie). SimCity can run offline, but it's hard to argue about motivation. Maybe one should give him that point.
In the same spirit - here the sentence he wrote which offended me the most:
> The complaints against us last year were our support of SOPA (not true), and that they didn’t like the ending to Mass Effect 3.
The complaints against the ending of Mass Effect 3 reach far deeper than "not liking". The ending broke every promise and every announcement made about it prior and it lead to the feeling that every decision made in the whole trilogy was meaningless, because no decision had any effect in the ending at all, neither in the result nor in the fight before(!). That is not "not liking", that broke hundreds of thousands of gamer-hearts and still hurts.
To start a PR-fluff-piece with a misleading on such an emotional topic doesn't seem very smart to me.
I think we don't actually know their motivations. For example, it could be as simple as they want to be able to sell stuff in-game, wanted to save development time by eliminating another configuration to test, push software upgrades and bugfixes, monitor your play time, resist cheaters, or eventually leverage players into an online social network. It could also be an anti-piracy DRM measure too of course.
While there are a few valid points raised, by and large this screed reminds me of the last time I worked in IT in a large bank, and took the annual employee satisfaction survey.
The IT function had the poorest scores across the entire bank, and the CIO took quite a bit of heat for it from the rest of the CxOs.
His approach to tackle the poor employee satisfaction scores was to call an IT-wide "town hall" and explain to each of us why we were wrong in being dissatisfied...
I agree. The whole letter is one of the best documentations of large-corporation dysfunctional defensiveness I've ever seen.
It's perfect. And not in a good way.
The sad thing is that by putting something so self-deluded and defensive out in public, he's guaranteeing a death spiral for corporate morale and corporate recruiting. It's awful leadership.
Spin 101: Muddy up the legitimate complaints about Origin and the fumbled SimCity launch with anecdotes about conservatives carpetbombing the company with hate mail regarding LGBTQ playables. Notice that was the last bullet point; you move forward to the next paragraph thinking "wow, that's terrible," and you're shocked enough about that to start forgetting the first bullet points. The next paragraph then doubles down on the LGBTQ hate. You've completely forgotten the SimCity bullet point now.
Oh yeah, and without you realizing it, he just lightly compared your complaints about SimCity always-on to gay bashing and not liking the choice of a cover athlete for a sports game. Apparently, EA considers all of them equally frivolous. How 'bout that, huh?
This is a pretty good example of how to tell your customers that they're wrong but not leave them feeling like you did so (he did get pretty direct on the DRM point, though, which is interesting). Just look at the love pouring in on the comments over there already, which shows you that it's working in the general case. Not to mention completely omitting what you're going to do about the problems, but cleverly disguising the omission itself.
A final thought, all of that aside: If I were Will Wright, I'd be genuinely sad about what happened to SimCity regardless of the circumstances of the Maxis sale. He left EA in 2009, which makes you wonder how long this SimCity has been in development; I'd wager about three years. That's a hallowed franchise in gaming, in my opinion, a unique IP that stood among the ranks of Civilization in its own way for many years and spawned really fun games like SimTower and SimAnt, and after this it will never be the same.
Wow. That LGBT bullet point and statement left me mouth agape.
No matter what opinions and thoughts you have on gay marriage and LGBTQ issues, it's blatantly obvious that there is a current cultural shift in the US. In a max of 10 years, and probably much sooner, gay marriage will undoubtedly be legal. And right now, it's more socially acceptable to support gay marriage and hold progressive LGBT views then to not.
So when EA tries to play the 'we will not back down from our core principles!' card, it comes out sounding like a lame cry to try and drum up some good feelings towards EA.
Then the conclusion "The tallest trees catch the most wind. At EA we remain proud and unbowed." just reenforces this.
A poor decision by EA to write and post that statement.
The basic message seems to be: We're doing fine in terms of strategy, if not execution.
The mea culpas are limited to basically fumbling implementation details: games falling short of expectations, server end-of-life schedules, the botched SimCity launch. But not the fact that SimCity is always-online (which we're told is not DRM), or the question whether games need to be set up in a way that EA has the ability to disable multiplayer functionality.
Those are strategic decisions, which like F2P games and micropayments and building their own online distribution platform, they are on the right path. Putting those issues along with different sorts of controversies such as LGBT content in games seems a bit odd.
So it's basically a bracket. Not the most well-thought-out approach. Who picks the companies that are even eligible? Why not just have one big poll at the start? Even if they took that approach, I think it's clear EA would still 'win' since there is definitely a votebomb-like effect (much like what happens with MetaCritic ratings occasionally). Clearly the type of people that were aware of this poll in the first place mainly reside on videogame forums (Neogaf, /r/gaming etc), so the mob mentality is natural. Who can honestly say they were aware of this poll?
If you knocked on the door of every household in America and asked them who they thought was the 'Worst Company' in the world, it certainly wouldn't be EA.
I am not defending EA as such, I don't agree with some of their business practices, but there are copious amounts of hyperbole and for people to be treating this like an accurate study is ridiculous.
There is certainly a first-world problems vibe when a videogame publisher wins a poll like this.
Every year The Consumerist opens submissions for a week or two. Readers submit companies and the 16 finalists are chosen (not sure if it's pure numbers or there is some editorial discretion).
At that point it's all voting by readers.
It's easy for someone like EA to get high in a bracket like this. They've pissed off a lot of people who are active on the internet, and they've been against some easy targets. AnheiserBusch/InBev isn't a company that people line up to hate (unlike Walmart or some other perpetual nominees) and Facebook, despite often acting creepy as hell, is loved by millions and millions of people.
On the other hand, EA keeps making enemies; and their last dustup was just weeks before the content.
There are obviously many reasons to hate EA, but it is FAR from the worst company in America. Overall EA has had a positive effect on the economy and created many jobs (even if they are not "great" jobs). Many other companies have taken govt. bailouts and/or gambled tax-payer money. Let's be civil and have some perspective.
Do gamers enjoy paying an extra fee to play used games online? There seem to be no end to the accolades thrown your way for centralizing multiplayer on EA servers and shutting them down a year or two after game release.
In case you really are kidding yourselves with this press release, you are likely being voted the worst company because your millions of customers are suffering your "innovations" -- not enjoying them -- in order to play series they've come to love: Mass Effect, Dragon Age, and SimCity. You are cashing in the stored value of these brands, not building on them.
But look, Microsoft was hated for a long time, too, and it didn't seem to hurt them any. Well, except maybe in the instances where they got into telling their users what they wanted instead of finding out what they wanted. It's not like you folks are going down that road, right?
I was excited by the prospect of seeing a new CEO come in and possibly change the culture of EA, but after reading this piece I'm thinking that idea was probably naive. This lack of user empathy seems pretty pervasive.
I've always found defensiveness really unattractive, especially in companies. Unless you are bringing new facts to bear, any piece that tries to make the "we're not so bad as all that" argument will probably be unsuccessful at winning hearts or minds.
Yeah. When has trying to convince critics that they're wrong ever worked? EA/Maxis keep trying.
They simply can't win this one. They're in the wrong, and for the most part they probably know it. If they can't say anything positive, the best response would probably be radio silence until everything blows over. Stuff like this only fans the flames.
Indeed, this kind of statements do not make much sense to me. They make the critics angrier and everyone else just wont care. If you instead saying nothing you get the same benefits without making the critics angry.
Or just honesty . . . I don't know how it would blow over in the press, but personally I would find it really refreshing if they just said, "Yeah, it's always online because you fuckers pirate too much. Deal with it." I guess that the gamers would probably not like that very much though.
At the beginning I thought it was good piece of humble thoughts: What did we do wrong ? How can we improve ? Then I realized it was exactly the contrary. Atrocious.
Maybe listen to the complaints and adress them instead of just dismissing them as wrong. This article just made me upset, they would of done better just shutting up.
specifically in this case with Madden and NFL2K you are absolutely right. It's not even that nfl2k was any good or not. It's just that the loss of competition gave the various madden dev teams over the years ZERO motivation to do what the hardcore madden gamers wanted them to do to improve the game. yes they (we) are a minority and they want to sell as many copies as possible, but seriously, even in their own house Madden is subpar compared to FIFA. FIFA had online multiplayer a good 3 years before Madden. It took Madden about 7 years into "Next Gen" consoles (PS3/x360) to revamp online franchise even though they actually promised it every year. instead they focus on "Presentation" like hand warmers. please. And they justify their decisions by "Telemetry" aka usage stats, but those are extremely misleading. A couple years ago they put out a half-baked online franchise with horrible bugs. Their "telemetry" told them very few gamers used that game mode, so they decided to scratch it and try to completely redesign online franchise from scratch, again. Well of course nobody used that game mode! It was broken!... ay ay ay, dont get me started...
120 comments
[ 29.1 ms ] story [ 746 ms ] thread"45 million registered users are proving them wrong."
Such a goofy and useless statistic. When you require registration for your products, that doesn't mean people are satisfied users of your service, it means you got a lot of people to sign up. It's not an accurate metric for how many people actually enjoy and use the service.
Continuing...
"Some people think that free-to-play games and micro-transactions are a pox on gaming. Tens of millions more are playing and loving those games."
Again: just because you have a bunch of people willing to pay you money for your crap, doesn't mean it isn't crap and you couldn't be doing better.
This sort of defense mechanism doesn't even address the problems people are having. It's almost insulting to everyone who does, legitimately, have a gripe with EA as a company. Those folks angry with EA's principles, games, or for simply not getting the value of what they paid are being cast aside.
It's extremely obvious they're less concerned with addressing issues and more concerned with telling everyone about how many users they have or what their sales are:
"But here’s the truth: each year EA interacts with more than 350 million gamers; Origin is breaking records for revenue and users; The Simpsons: Tapped Out and Real Racing 3 are at the top of the mobile charts; Battlefield 3 and FIFA are stunning achievements with tens of millions of players; and SimCity is being enjoyed by millions of passionate fans all over the world."
It seems possible to paraphrase the entirety of this press release: "We recognize a lot of people hate us, but hey, we've got a lot of other people paying us who aren't you, so we can't be that wrong, can we?"
Why do people buy EA games if they hate them so much?
People hate TicketMaster but they aren't willing to forego a concert to voice their opinion. People hate BofA but they don't know about the great alternatives they have in credit unions. People hate comcast, but sometimes it's the only ISP available. Similarly, EA touches on all of these fronts.
Further, EA's strategy of late has been to acquire IP to which gamers have already developed a sentimental attachment. So you may hate EA, but you really love Commander Shepard, so you do what you gotta do to keep hanging out with her.
Unfortunately, there's also an aspect that consumers don't get a whole lot of choices. Movies are a decent comparison to that. Why are there so many bad sequels that everyone hates? Cause they still buy tickets. Any movie > no movie.
Plus, EA used to make great games.
Anyways, this is the first EA game I've bought for myself since SimCity 4, first time I actually installed their platform Origin. Actually that points to the interesting reality, the people who buy these games may be simply purchasing a gift.
1) They own a number of franchises that had lots of fanboys before EA got them. The fanboys cling to the hope that EA won't screw it up.
2) They own a lot of sports franchises and in some cases have the only games which are officially licensed by the sporting bodies.
3) There are lots of newer , younger and older casual gamers who have completely different expectations about what they want from a gaming experience.
4) They advertise their games a lot , all over the place.
I agree with the rest of your comment though.
I can't think of one, which is telling. SimCity had the potential to be and, well, wasn't.
Source:
For the claim about Origin's license letting it scan your whole hard drive: http://www.nerdbuster.com/2011/09/eas-origin-wants-to-scan-y... http://www.gamespot.com/news/ea-origin-eula-sparks-privacy-c...
For the second claim about the one way copyright lawsuit provision: Chapter 17, section A can be found here: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&...
In it, they specifically say that the exemptions from this non-lawsuit clause are related to copyright (big claims) and small claims court. Since most users aren't likely to own copyright or patents, I call that stacking the deck of available actions.
I've bough^W licensed a DRM-encumbered game. Well, that happens. Just silently create me a nameless account behind the scenes without bothering me with forms and whatever. Tie it to PC and in case of reinstalls or multiple devices let me authenticate by entering CD key or whatever proof-of-purchase's available and then ask to create a password.
Meanwhile, just lure me to social hub or store with a menu option(s). If I'll find the service useful, I'll eventually fill out the details. If I won't - no reason to care about me anyway, as I won't use the service I don't like unless it's really enforced upon.
Nope. Got a game, but have to fill out forms. They want an email confirmation, secret question, obligatory CAPTCHA, cumbersome launcher software and whatever.
Origin, on the other hand, is coming into the market as an underdog entry from a hated company with a history of decommissioning game's DRM and multiplayer servers within a couple years of the game's release. While they've only had 2 years in the market to Steam's near-decade, unless Origin manages to come up with significantly more value added to the client itself, their IP is going to be their sole draw.
This means that if I want to play a Steam game (I have a couple like Portal) I must first wait for Steam to open up, get internet, log in (oh so slowly) and finally it will think about opening my game. However undoubtedly there's been an update and so steam will decide to install this first. All in all I'm bored by the time the Valve logo pops up and the actual game can start loading. Or you know, I could just pirate the game and it would open straight away without the need for Steam.
So in short, Steam is also horrible and forced. But at least they make better games and have something like customer support.
Whereas I have a steam account with a heap of paid for games. So in both cases I contribute to the total user count, dollars spent though is completely different.
Personally I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with F2P games with micro transactions. I feel Riot has created a great F2P game with League of Legends. Micro transactions are only used for non-essential stuffs (for example skins for your heroes or to "buy" heroes quicker then possible by the normal "grind").
For the rest I agree with your opinion. And with regards to SimCity, I really feel they should change the game to make the always-online functionality not required. Sooner or later the services will go down and in the current state the game will be useless.
Hell, Stalin had that many in 1948!
All of it can be interpreted this way: this PR piece isn't meant to address customer concerns -- it's meant to address shareholder concerns.
As someone who was an avid gamer, I felt like the statement was addressed to gamers. But, you may be more correct in saying it was for shareholders anyway.
I actually really appreciated the honesty of this piece because I think it shows some integrity on EA's part to be willing to admit fault. How many companies have driven themselves into irrelevance and destruction by thinking they were right every time?
I don't think it's worth talking down their numbers either, consumers vote with their wallets. If you really though a product was crap, you'd find something else, otherwise there's clearly something of quality there that keeps you coming back.
I work in the newer side of the games industry and see in painful detail how far EA has to go to catch up with recent trends and regain their dominance in the marketplace, but as someone who's also had my fair share of memorable experiences from EA games, I'm pulling for them.
Just to clarify, he was referencing the free game offer to people who already bought SimCity. [1]
[1] https://help.ea.com/article/simcity-something-extra
http://www.apple.com/au/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/
when you're misquoting people to make your point, maybe something is wrong with your argument. BTW I have no connection to EA and don't think I own any EA games.
Also, if you are uncertain of who publishes the games you own, you can't outright deny connection with a publisher.
Sure it's not 100% word-for-word, but the sentiment is spot-on. What's your problem with his quotation?
Thing is, customers don't have a love-affair with the products of those other companies. We do with EA's products at their best. A great game is a treasure, personal, forming great experiences and memories in almost the same way a child or puppy does.
So when a game maker fails so epically, betrays their customers so thoroughly and completely, it tends to spark a serious reaction. A reaction more akin to a friend betraying you and selling you out.
As for oil spills: I can envision how that might happen through mere incompetence and laziness. I have more trouble envisioning how EA can do what they've been doing through mere incompetence; it's far more baffling than that.
"Many continue to claim the Always-On function in SimCity is a DRM scheme. It’s not. People still want to argue about it. We can’t be any clearer – it’s not. Period."
He's flat out lying. I have no interest whatsoever in what he is saying. SimCity can technically run offline, gamers want to run it offline, but EA won't let you run it offline because you could then pirate their software. They should just demonstrate some courage and admit it.
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21802508
If it was just a matter of DRM, then it's plain inconsistent with how they're approaching DRM with every other PC release they've done recently.
In the same spirit - here the sentence he wrote which offended me the most:
> The complaints against us last year were our support of SOPA (not true), and that they didn’t like the ending to Mass Effect 3.
The complaints against the ending of Mass Effect 3 reach far deeper than "not liking". The ending broke every promise and every announcement made about it prior and it lead to the feeling that every decision made in the whole trilogy was meaningless, because no decision had any effect in the ending at all, neither in the result nor in the fight before(!). That is not "not liking", that broke hundreds of thousands of gamer-hearts and still hurts.
To start a PR-fluff-piece with a misleading on such an emotional topic doesn't seem very smart to me.
Verifiable fact.
> gamers want to run it offline, but
Verifiable fact.
> EA won't let you run it offline
Verifiable fact.
> because you could then pirate their software.
Whoa, unsubstantiated conclusion there.
I think we don't actually know their motivations. For example, it could be as simple as they want to be able to sell stuff in-game, wanted to save development time by eliminating another configuration to test, push software upgrades and bugfixes, monitor your play time, resist cheaters, or eventually leverage players into an online social network. It could also be an anti-piracy DRM measure too of course.
The IT function had the poorest scores across the entire bank, and the CIO took quite a bit of heat for it from the rest of the CxOs.
His approach to tackle the poor employee satisfaction scores was to call an IT-wide "town hall" and explain to each of us why we were wrong in being dissatisfied...
It's perfect. And not in a good way.
The sad thing is that by putting something so self-deluded and defensive out in public, he's guaranteeing a death spiral for corporate morale and corporate recruiting. It's awful leadership.
Oh yeah, and without you realizing it, he just lightly compared your complaints about SimCity always-on to gay bashing and not liking the choice of a cover athlete for a sports game. Apparently, EA considers all of them equally frivolous. How 'bout that, huh?
This is a pretty good example of how to tell your customers that they're wrong but not leave them feeling like you did so (he did get pretty direct on the DRM point, though, which is interesting). Just look at the love pouring in on the comments over there already, which shows you that it's working in the general case. Not to mention completely omitting what you're going to do about the problems, but cleverly disguising the omission itself.
A final thought, all of that aside: If I were Will Wright, I'd be genuinely sad about what happened to SimCity regardless of the circumstances of the Maxis sale. He left EA in 2009, which makes you wonder how long this SimCity has been in development; I'd wager about three years. That's a hallowed franchise in gaming, in my opinion, a unique IP that stood among the ranks of Civilization in its own way for many years and spawned really fun games like SimTower and SimAnt, and after this it will never be the same.
No matter what opinions and thoughts you have on gay marriage and LGBTQ issues, it's blatantly obvious that there is a current cultural shift in the US. In a max of 10 years, and probably much sooner, gay marriage will undoubtedly be legal. And right now, it's more socially acceptable to support gay marriage and hold progressive LGBT views then to not.
So when EA tries to play the 'we will not back down from our core principles!' card, it comes out sounding like a lame cry to try and drum up some good feelings towards EA.
Then the conclusion "The tallest trees catch the most wind. At EA we remain proud and unbowed." just reenforces this.
A poor decision by EA to write and post that statement.
The mea culpas are limited to basically fumbling implementation details: games falling short of expectations, server end-of-life schedules, the botched SimCity launch. But not the fact that SimCity is always-online (which we're told is not DRM), or the question whether games need to be set up in a way that EA has the ability to disable multiplayer functionality.
Those are strategic decisions, which like F2P games and micropayments and building their own online distribution platform, they are on the right path. Putting those issues along with different sorts of controversies such as LGBT content in games seems a bit odd.
All in all, the opposite of an apology, really.
Have they not heard the phrase "the customer is always right"?
So it's basically a bracket. Not the most well-thought-out approach. Who picks the companies that are even eligible? Why not just have one big poll at the start? Even if they took that approach, I think it's clear EA would still 'win' since there is definitely a votebomb-like effect (much like what happens with MetaCritic ratings occasionally). Clearly the type of people that were aware of this poll in the first place mainly reside on videogame forums (Neogaf, /r/gaming etc), so the mob mentality is natural. Who can honestly say they were aware of this poll?
If you knocked on the door of every household in America and asked them who they thought was the 'Worst Company' in the world, it certainly wouldn't be EA.
I am not defending EA as such, I don't agree with some of their business practices, but there are copious amounts of hyperbole and for people to be treating this like an accurate study is ridiculous.
There is certainly a first-world problems vibe when a videogame publisher wins a poll like this.
At that point it's all voting by readers.
It's easy for someone like EA to get high in a bracket like this. They've pissed off a lot of people who are active on the internet, and they've been against some easy targets. AnheiserBusch/InBev isn't a company that people line up to hate (unlike Walmart or some other perpetual nominees) and Facebook, despite often acting creepy as hell, is loved by millions and millions of people.
On the other hand, EA keeps making enemies; and their last dustup was just weeks before the content.
In case you really are kidding yourselves with this press release, you are likely being voted the worst company because your millions of customers are suffering your "innovations" -- not enjoying them -- in order to play series they've come to love: Mass Effect, Dragon Age, and SimCity. You are cashing in the stored value of these brands, not building on them.
But look, Microsoft was hated for a long time, too, and it didn't seem to hurt them any. Well, except maybe in the instances where they got into telling their users what they wanted instead of finding out what they wanted. It's not like you folks are going down that road, right?
Well, what a brilliant piece of PR there.
They simply can't win this one. They're in the wrong, and for the most part they probably know it. If they can't say anything positive, the best response would probably be radio silence until everything blows over. Stuff like this only fans the flames.
Enjoy until you go bankrupt, dear Mr Moore.
At the beginning I thought it was good piece of humble thoughts: What did we do wrong ? How can we improve ? Then I realized it was exactly the contrary. Atrocious.
https://www.ea.com/1/service-updates
I believe gaming would be in a much better place overall if EA did not exist, despite many early hit titles.
The overall effect on gaming as a whole has been negative.
I hated the article starting there.
It is cowardly, evasive and deceitful. It completely ignores the issues people have with EA.
good luck with that one EA