http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/ea-we-want-to-be-voted-the-best-company-in-america/0125002

My view is that of course EA isn't the worst company in America when you still have tobacco companies etc. But this guy isn't exactly saying the right things when EA is the company that released Battlefield 4 (their biggest release of the fucking year!) in a broken state, went all in with the always online bullshit with Sim City etc. etc. Like Jim Sterling has said, EA rarely come up with new ways to fuck consumers, but they almost always take the tried and true methods to new extremes.

Can EA do anything to win back consumer confidence? My view is that at the end of the day EA is a company, and its goal is of course to make money. Unless consumers actually stop buying the Battlefields or the Sim Cities on day one, they'll never change and have no intention of changing.

What.. you mean people don't make these games out of the kindness of their hearts?

Shocking, I know.

I understand the PC version of BF4 being broken, but the console versions should be stable. Alas they arn't.

EA really needs to work on that, lol

Yeah. Until the gaming industry stops this idiotic trend of forcing games to ship before they release, none of them deserve the aforementioned title. Maybe it's my age, or my experience in the industry, but I'm getting really sick and tired of this mental state gaming companies are adapting where releasing a game in such a state is considered okay. DLC/patching is not meant to be your trojan-horse to implement bug fixes or content additions that should've been present in the game before. I would be really surprised if North America doesn't adopt some sort of legal system to battle this kind of nonsense happening. People may look at the issue, and tact on the same old "it's just a game," but gaming is not a cheap hobby, and I expect my games to work properly, just as much as I expect my brand new couch I just purchased to not collapse under me.

They are selling NBA Live for 70 Euros, fuck those guys.

Yeah well good luck to them. They have a pretty long and steep mountain to climb. Somehow I don't believe it tho, maybe i'm a cynic, or maybe that's just regular company PR running their mouth off.

I think one way that'll help is they stop being listed on NASDAQ. That way, they have no shareholders to answer to. No pressure to print money/increase their share price should mean less pressure to release games in their unfinished state. Less broken games means more people will appreciate your games (and your company) more. More appreciation means lesser votes for worst company of the year.

Well, not being listed isn't the same as not having stockholders - they definitely still have people who'll yell at them if they don't hit quarterly targets and etc. Still, it's nice to see them at least pay some lip service to the concerns that gamers have.

Edit: And, of course, it's absolutely insane to have them voted as the worst company of the year - by any stretch of the imagination.

Yes, it would pretty much mean taking the company private a la Dell for me to take such an endeavor seriously, but to call them the worst company in America really does illustrate a level of ignorance on the evils committed by companies that impact issues which are actually important.

They could start by ditching Origin and just using Steam like the rest of the free world. Okay, so the rest of the free world doesn't use it, but I enjoy Valve's walled-garden marketplace more than EA's.

I'm guessing they're limiting themselves to for-profits, but even then its pretty unlikely. Still not as unlikely as them ever being the worst company in America.

What? NO.

The PC Version should be perfect. The new console version being broken is acceptable since this is all new hardware but the PC version? Jusst No.

@humanity said:

Nope, you guessed it, it's all out of passion for the craft.

I agree that it's least understandable that the PC version is so broken. DICE has been a PC dev for years and years now. It's more "understandable" that the console versions are broken (current gen is a "moving target", the engine is pushing PS3/360 to the brink), but it's by no means acceptable. When you release a product it should work from day 1, not from week three or whatever. Customers have become way too used to games being broken at the start, especially online games. It's never acceptable that a product doesn't work, I don't care if you're able to patch it after a couple of weeks.

EA and other publishers have realized that people don't seem to care about a game not working right away when they buy a game, so they keep doing this shit. Of course they knew that Battlefield 4 wouldn't work at the start, but they released it anyways because people don't vote with their wallet. Battlefield 5 will probably be just as broken as Battlefield 4, and people will bitch on the internet after they've recieved their pre-ordered version of the game. And the cycle continues...

EA is by no means alone in doing this, but they're one of the worst publishers when it comes to releasing broken games and "fixing them" with patches post release.

Didn't EA just go through some infrastructural changes? Let's give them a year or two to see what the new people in charge can change, or not change, before saying they failed. EA is a massive ship, and there's a lot of momentum that company has built up going in the wrong direction, it's going to take more than a couple months to shift that.

I think EA's idea of becoming the best company in the world is tasking unpaid interns to make a hundred accounts each and vote them the best company in the world, not to change policy.

I dont think it's humanly possible for any public company to be the best company. Shareholders don't give a fuck about anything except making money, which inhibits what companies can achieve. Being private is why valve can do cool shit and take risks

Well, i guess it's important for any company to have goals. No matter how unrealistic.

Sim City. That is all.

They never should have been voted the worst in the first place, far from it.

*Shrug* It's the internet; there exists no better showcase of people's super-localized worries, concerns, and total ignorance of international issues.

Delisting isn't the key here. I think what companies need to start to realise is that THERE'S MONEY TO BE MADE IN BEING GOOD TO YOUR CONSUMERS. People can make the excuses they want for why Valve, Blizzard, Rockstar and company can release on the schedule they do ("they've earned it" and all that), but the truth is, they earned that trust for a reason. You don't become trusted by putting out enough hugely promising but broken games that people decide you've earned time to finally finish one; you get there by releasing quality, by doing it predictably, and by making people feel like they can be certain that the product they pick up on day one will meet the level of quality you've promised.

I think it's a ridiculously short-sighted BUSINESS practice (forgetting even the fact that you should sell people something that WORKS), and I think the sooner companies realise that trust, despite not looking very good on quarterly spreadsheets, can be one of the biggest boons to a business. Yes, maybe you get a quarter of loss from pushing back products and giving them room to mature, but until shareholders / board members realise that sometimes a quarter's loss is what it takes to get people to take you seriously again, they'll just keep running this treadmill until people get sick of running behind them.

EA isn't the worst company in America, but getting this sort of online reaction two years in a row has to be at least a little eye-opening. People wouldn't flood that poll with votes against EA if they didn't have some sort of legitimate issue with the company, no matter how small. And it's easier to vote against a company that you've interacted with in some way than a company like, say, Haliburton, that does not have a visible impact on most people's day-to-day lives (or at least, the lives of those people that would access the poll in question).

The thing I feel is back at the start of last-gen consoles, EA decided to take a gamble on some new studios and a few new ideas, which became dominant franchises throughout. They then promptly did a lot of damage to said franchises by pushing them out as quickly as possible and adding in business models that really shouldn't have been there and making the core experience worse off for the player. Now I know it's because they made a large loss on these new IP's but some of the sale predictions have been absolutely insane (Dead Space 3 had to sell 5 million copies or they'll kill off the franchise? That's more than 1+2 sold COMBINED).

It'd be great if they realised that not every game can be a Triple A juggernaut with millions put into it, and maybe if they did some smaller stuff with tighter budgets we'd get rid of the obsessive need for micro-transactions in every game.

It'd also be nice if they finally remembered the importance of customer satisfaction, instead of pushing the line of how much people will put up with before they stop buying your games.

Bank of America has dodged a bullet both years that EA has been voted worst company. Like seriously. Video game publisher is more evil than one of the biggest banks in the world? Puh-lease.

I think the whole think is a scam. The truly evil companies are paying for EA to win to take the heat off themselves.

Look. One of us has to lose, let's make it the videogame company because then anyone with any degree of intelligence will write the whole thing off as complete nonsense.

I don't think that's the point. EA might not ACTUALLY be the worst company in America, but that doesn't mean that people don't have legitimate issues with them. The hope from a lot of people who voted for them was that EA would wake the fuck up and realize that they aren't the universally loved game publisher everyone at the company likes to pretend they are. I think this interview proves that they at least heard their audience.

Listen, no matter how bad Dead Space 3 (as far as I know, the only EA published game of this year that I've played) was, it's still not as bad as say... anything that Haliburton or Bank of America get up to on a daily basis.

But they'll never be voted "Best Company in America" because they're a soulless corporate entity that has to answer to shareholders, which means making money. Which means microtransactions and questionable attempts at competing with Call of Duty instead of farting out rainbows and cheap digital games like Valve does.

In fairness, it's not like the competition is all that steep.

jesus lord almighty you people will justify anything and everything with THEY ARE A COMPANY THEY NEED TO MAKE MONEY. Making Money doesn't justify everything, sorry, and that includes moral and artistic integrity. We're humans first and foremost, not bank accounts.

No, they are nowhere near the worst company in America but they are clearly the most hated games publisher who ever existed, and that's not going to change until they stop dumbing down DA, sexing up ME and releasing scams nobody wants (Hey Sim City!). None of those things actually conflict with making money. You know what does? Having an awful reputation.

The people who truly believe that EA is the worst company cannot be convinced that online passes aren't as bad as losing your house. Good luck with that, EA.

They'd get my vote of they gave Bioware total freedom and all of their money

It's pretty nuts how a video game publisher can be voted the worst company in a country. How messed up is that? Sometimes you cant help but feel ashamed to be part of the gaming community. Ah well wont stop me from playing game.

Considering only a week ago they were blaming Sony for the problems with Battlefield 4 and Need For Speed: Rivals, the chances of them ever being anything but a hated company in this community are somewhere between slim and nil until there's a huge attitude change, but even then they have to contend with their own wretched history. They'vedestroyed some of the most beloved game developers this industry has known for the sake of harvesting (and ruining) IPs, and have pioneered nearly every horriblebusiness practice of the previous generation. While I personally have no issue giving them a chance if they can change their ways, they need to understand that, for many, their name is irredeemable poison. While it's absolutely fucking insane that they were voted the worst company in America, they are almost certainly the worst video game publisher in America, lapping nearly all of the competition for that title.

It's a pretty tongue in cheek contest by Consumer Reports. Don't take it so seriously, It's not like the winning company will be destroyed. I say the super evil companies don't give a shit about the awards, It's fun to see EA get so worked up.

to be honest, if origin had as good as sales as Steam I would prefer Origin. It's much lighter than the Steam overlay and it looks way better (and is way more useful)

Making good Madden games would be a start.

Well, good for them. Reach for the top. Maybe Titanfall will have a perfect launch and everyone will pull a hard-180 like we did this last generation.

Okay, like I did.

I really fucking love Dead Space 1 and 2 okay?

Pffft good luck with that EA , never ask the devil for a miracle is what I say

They need to change there marketing strategy to Customers above money then money above customers to get some reliability back. But that's to hard for a company That big. So hoping the new CEO will bring some changes the next year. but i wont bet to hard on that since all of there share holders are mindless mummy's . knowing almost nothing about game's.