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EA COO Peter Moore has made an impassioned defence of the publisher in light of its lead at the top of a web poll where voters nominate the worst company in America.
Taking to a blog post, Moore admitted that the publisher had made plenty of mistakes, such as server shut downs, missteps on new pricing models, games that didn’t meet expectations and “severely fumbling” the launch of SimCity.
He added that EA owed consumers a better performance than this.
But despite saying some of the arguments against the company were 100 per cent correct, Moore claimed that there were numerous other reasons that “just don’t hold water” pushing EA up the rankings for the worst company in America.
He highlighted the ongoing furor surrounding SimCity’s always-on functionality, with many likening it to DRM. Moore stressed that this was not the case, and said “We can’t be any clearer – it’s not. Period”.
Other reasons he cited were its controversial use of microtransactions in games, despite “tens of millions” of players “loving those games”, and a number of consumers simply disagreeing with EA over its use of cover athlete for Madden NFL.
Moore also claimed that the publisher had received thousands of emails and postcards protesting against the company for allowing players to create LGBT characters in its games, as seen in the likes of Mass Effect and Star Wars: The Old Republic.
“We are committed to fixing our mistakes,” he said.
“Over the last three weeks, 900,000 SimCity players took us up on a free game offer for their troubles. We owed them that. We’re constantly listening to feedback from our players, through our Customer Experience group, Twitter, this blog, or other sites. The feedback is vital, and impacts the decisions we make.”
He added: “So here’s my response to this poll: We can do better. We will do better. But I am damn proud of this company, the people around the globe who work at EA, the games we create and the people that play them.
“The tallest trees catch the most wind. At EA we remain proud and unbowed.”
