Electronic Arts has been named the worst company in America for a second year in a row, according to consumer watchdog website The Consumerist. One of the largest video game publishers in the world, the company beat Bank of America, Comcast and Ticketmaster to take home the not-so-coveted “Golden Poo” Award.
The reason for EA’s demise is due to the companies terrible digital rights management practices (DRM), high cost of games, non-existent customer support, and more.
“EA made a royal mess of the SimCity release by failing to foresee that the people who would buy the game — and who would, per the game’s design, be required to connect to the EA servers — might actually want to play at some point in the week after making their purchase,” wrote The Consumerist. “But that’s just the latest in EA’s long history of annoying its customer base with bad support. Customers who paid full price for games, or who spent or saved huge piles of in-game cash in EA’s online products, would suddenly find a problem with their accounts, but attempts to rectify the problem — or even get a response from EA — would go unheeded.”
Peter Moore, Chief Operating Office of Electronic Arts, wrote in a statement to gamers that the company could do better but the award was unwarranted.
“Are we really the ‘Worst Company in America?'” Moore asked. “I’ll be the first to admit that we’ve made plenty of mistakes. These include server shut downs too early, games that didn’t meet expectations, missteps on new pricing models and most recently, severely fumbling the launch of SimCity. We owe gamers better performance than this. … 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 “Golden Poo” Award is the least of EA’s problems. The company is currently dealing with replacing their former CEO John Riccitiello who left the company after he was unable to keep his promise to turn the company around. EA stock has dropped to a quarter of its 2005 high.
“Make no mistake: Video games are big business,” The Consumerist wrote. “A company like EA — and Activision, Ubisoft, Nintendo, and Sony, etc. — merits just as much scrutiny as any other business that plays a leading role in a multibillion-dollar industry. It’s only a fractured, antiquated public perception that video games are somehow frivolous holdovers from childhood that allows gamers to be abused and taken advantage of by the very people who supply them the games they play.”
Some of Electronic Arts most successful franchises include FIFA, Madden, The Sims, Battlefield, and Mass Effect.
