/images/social_rss_dark.png "Subscribe to the site")
/images/social_twitter_dark.png "Follow us on Twitter")
/images/social_facebook_dark.png "Friend us on FaceBook")
Electronic Arts Voted The Worst Company in America
Electronic Arts (EA) has won the award for the ‘Worst Company in America for 2012′, based on a recent poll from website Consumerist. We’re now positive that this tally is thanks to the voting audience made up of mostly cats, boycotting consumers and CEOs of failing American banks.
“We’re sure that British Petroleum, AIG, Philip Morris, and Halliburton are all relieved they weren’t nominated this year. We’re going to continue making award-winning games and services played by more than 300 million people worldwide.”
These words come straight from the mouth of Senior Director of EA Corporate Communications John Reseburg, when discussing the turn of events with Kotaku. The company hasn’t said very much publicly about the poll results beyond that.
But honestly, do you as a consumer and human being truly consider Electronic Arts to be the worst company in America? Of the myriad of awful, terrible companies that exist in the United States, you (meaning the voters, of course) have come to the conclusion that a video game publisher is simply the most evil, diabolical organization in our midst?
Aside from your Mass Effect 3 endings, your online passes, and your DRM systems, what is it really that makes EA so evil that they win an award for being the absolute worst? Seems a tad irrational, don’t’ you think?
Think about it — Electronic Arts is not the worst company in America. While there are most certainly some not-so-liked practices of EA and other modern publishers, without them you would have no Mass Effect, no Dragon Age, no Battlefield 3, Burnout, Command and Conquer, Crysis, Sims, Madden, Medal of Honor, Need for Speed, SSX Tricky, or Baldur’s Gate.
And by the Lord Almighty you wouldn’t have Championship Bass Fishing: 2000. What a pitiful reality that would be.
So before you react, before you comment, and heaven forbid before you tweet — pause. Take a moment, and realize that while a video game company may have caused you frustrations of all sorts, they’ve also helped to make many of the most fantastic and treasured gaming experiences a reality.
Then again, they’ve also pissed you off a lot — so there’s that.
Have they made stupid choices that aren’t beneficial to the consumer before? Yes. Many publishers have.
Does that make them the worst company in America? Not in my book.
I’ve said my thoughts — now let’s hear yours. Open the comment floodgates.
/images/blank.gif){kind=spacer}
/images/top.png)
Goldman Sachs: treats clients like shit, owned a stake in a business that aids and abets sex trafficking, and helped contribute to one of the worst economic catastrophes since the Great Depression.
EA: Makes you use Origin if you want to play BF3 on the PC.
Yeah, I can see how EA is worse. Sure.
2+
I find it amazing that gamers only seem to bash the one that is on top at the moment. At the launch of any COD game Activision is the worst company ever and at the launch of a big EA title EA is now the worst one ever. They are both terrible, most of the publishers are anyways.
EA isnt the worst company out there though, what they sell is just a luxury, the banks and some other componies on the other hand…
Personally I’ve hated EA for years. While I’m not American, I can’t say for certain it’s the worst company in America, but it’s definitely one of the worst and the worst game publisher.
My example: How many other games publisher has given you the option of cheats, but only if you pay them for them? (There’s probably a few, but none as big as EA) And even then, they’re not good cheats. A good cheat is something like God Mode, not hints on where to go next!
Capcom was doing that for Dead Rising… I’m willing to bet Skyrim will do it too… Hell, they’ll strap six foot schlongs on the heads of every NPC if it meant we’ll give them more money… Does this mean they’re evil? If being evil is being able to make us buy schlong DLC, then yes……… Penis………
To be honest most of my games have the EA logo on them. I may be suffering from Stockholm syndrome though.
in my opinion they are not the worst company in the U.S, but most definitly the worst Gaming Company.EVER.
Activision is Waaaay worse than EA
Sadly a vast majority of companies are so bad that basically each year they all decide which one gets to be the scape goat for a year, next year it will be activision just watch. Point being they know that people are dumb enough to not care and they know that they can easily breeze over any bad PR over the collective amnesia of the consumer community(gamers included but as a whole we are all very very bad at sticking up for ourselves, wonder what our great grand parents think of this generation.)
They were on a list of SOPA supporters. They no longer deserve any ounce of respect from me.
I think they might’ve voted it the worst just to get their website more appealing to more audiences. Maybe the ME3 crybabies did it?
Anyways, EA isn’t an evil company, they do bad things in terms of gaming but they’re not evil.
They don’t have bad intentions, they just want to distribute games and make money doing it.
Most of my games have EA on them, and yes they aren’t perfect, but consider this…
Do they give you 4 DLC packs that cost as much as the game?
Do they give you stupid things like horse armor?
Are they games never polished (Bethesda)?
And what about the banks that took everyone’s money and created a economic crisis…
I would feel Activision are much worse in terms of cancelling games and closing studios, but I feel EA actually made a bounce back to top form in the past few years. I hated them in 2008, I felt they pushed mediocre games that sold undeserving numbers, but over the past 2-3 years they have been striving with new IPs, which is something you rarely see in the video game industry nowadays.
To be honest, BoA hasn’t effected me. I have Chase bank, I don’t own a house with a mortgage, and no puppies of mine have been murdered by them.
EA on the other hand has. It has shut down some of my favorite developers, man handled the other few, and IMO taken some of my favorite franchises and turned them into a less niche version of themselves(not necessarily bad) on top of nickel and diming every game the release.
TL;DR I’m not effected by BoA, but I am affected by EA.
It’s not the most evil company in America by a long shot, but they sure are sleazy, and lazy, and sometimes inconsiderate, and so on.
I love their games, I just detest how they handle business in general, with a passion.
I heard that a few people voted because their was a problem with the iphone Rock band application, but to be honest i think that Activision Blizzard is the worst company. EA is on a similar pedistal but Activision really pushes its games out too frequently ruining it’s own franchises and bought franchises, they don’t allow much development time for their games and they make some pretty terrible games, They Fucked Guitar hero, they keep fucking Spyro and Crash bandicoot, and they Push out a COD game every year, with minor changes and the same engine for 10 fucking years expecting the consumer to buy (AND THEY DO) a shitty $100 upgrade every year and Map packs that cost just about the same as the game when i think their should be more included with the game than what comes with it… They also havn’t done much with World of Warcraft and have been milking that for sooo long. All their products don’t have much innovation… the Blizzard subsidiary isn’t that bad, but it is part of the same company. My point is, they don’t care about their product or the consumer. they care about money. Best game company has to be Valve. no doubt in my mind.
Activision is not worse than EA. Activision is greedy, but EA takes it to new extremes. EA is evil because they actually affect the American public. You’re an idiot if you thought people would vote for some company that has ties to something that is wrong in nature, but doesn’t even matter to us.
It is a FACT that every developer that EA has bought has begun to fail since their purchase. EA does not care about the gaming industry, yet they’re one of the biggest companies in it. They care more about money than keeping consumers happy, and that’s why they’re evil. It has nothing to do with the fact that they’re a big company. People who think that’s all it’s about are so damn dense it’s unreal. Not all big companies are considered evil. Microsoft isn’t, but Apple is. Why? Because Microsoft is out to make money, but they don’t use the stupidity of Americans like Apple does.
We hate EA because they fuck us over repeatedly, and KNOW they do, because we have been complaining for YEARS. The fact that they don’t change their ways shows their arrogance. It shows that they simply don’t give a fuck, and will do whatever they want, because they near control the industry.
Author attributes a list of games to EA. I posit that some of those series would have come to fruition without EA’s help. I give credit to the DEVELOPERS who put their souls into these games, not the corporate bosses at EA who merely use their money in an effort to make more money. EA’s more like an investment firm…they buy up the intellectual properties of true artists, smack their logo on it, and send it out just in time for the holidays. Their goal is profit, has always been profit, and will only ever be profit. I’m not trying to dis capitalism, but they would sell their own soul for a nickel (as long as we also installed some DRM so that we could only access said soul via internet connection).
EA is the worst game developers and publishers that ever existed on Earth. The Mass effect 3 multiplayer servers crashes on wave 11 or even when you are about to finish a match. They have the worst multiplayer servers of all times. They treat us ( costumers) like shit and they don’s give a fuck about our own personal feelings about a game. Activision is the second worst company ever. They cancelled Crash Bandicoo series alongside Guitar hero Becouse they did not get an affordable profit from both, wich is bullshit because both game series really rocked. They trashed Radical entertainmet (game company and co-creators of Crash Bandicoot series). They fired the empoyees of that company until they became dust. Activision alongside with EA are both bullshitters and son of a ****. Yea they gave us great games,wich obliviously aren;t that good because I can’t play Mass effect 3 multiplayer because of the server crashes and battlefail 3 servers are shit. In my opinion bith companies deserve more than worst company title, They deserve The companies that never should have existed.
There’s a feature beyond the publisher-gamer interaction that people are overlooking, and that is it’s business practice and the way it treats it treats its staff.
EA has for many years now, been the almighty devourer of smaller publishers who on average seem to be in the biz for the love of it, making amazing games on their own terms. But once EA buys them out, they lose their souls and are subjected to EA’s tunnel-minded profit driven mentality. Staff are subjected to inhumane working conditions, having to work day and night and weekends to meet impossible deadlines while getting no overtime pay. There were huge scandals around this and many court cases ensued.
Dice was a recent victim of the EA devouring machine. Granted it made an incredible game (BF3), but it’s fell foul with gamers because they were forced to buy into EA’s latest money-grabbing gimmick: Origin, which is nothing more than a spyware program, designed to mine information and to increase profits by circumventing currently loved platforms like Steam.
The latest victim, and let’s all have a moment’s silence…. Popcap.
They brought us amazing games like Insaniquarium, Plants vs Zombies, Peggle, Bejeweled, etc.
EA is an evil company, in my opinion, for:
- Chewing up and spitting out some of the best game studios in the world.
- Subjecting staff to inhumane work conditions and no overtime pay (as if they don’t have the money)
- Putting their name on games before the hard working studios that busted their ass to produce it.
- Creating that abomination called Origin.
And lastly, for being all about money. EA is clearly about maximum profit, while the other makers we know and love are about the love of the game before profit.
Thank god for Valve. I hope they destroy EA one day….
It is difficult for many people to envision this ( and EA is big part of the reason), but interactive story telling gaming like the mass effect series is actually the newest form of art that the human race has created. properly conceived and implemented it has the potential to make a novel, or even a television series seem bland and 2 dimensional.
Instead of supporting this burgeoning art form, EA has been running around mugging not only those who enjoy it, but those who create it for profit. So, yeah, it may superficially seem like it isn’t a big deal, but EA is a lot of the reason that one of the most powerful forms of art and culture the human race has ever created has advanced as little as it has.
Basically, when you get down to it, the best analogy for the EA business model is that they go around buying and then burning libraries and printing presses so that they can sell the ash as fertilizer. For my part, that seems like the sort of thing worthy of being called the most evil company on earth.