Many things grind my gears. If you follow my Twitter account you'll know just how often I harp on about issues that bother me.
The one thing that's managed to piss me off today is The Consumerist's declaration of game publisher Electronic Arts as "the Worst Company in America." The decision wasn't made by the staff of the site but was rather based on votes on a poll.
Predictably, gamers who felt burned by EA's DLC policies and others furious over Mass Effect 3's ending rushed to the poll to key in their vote for EA as America's worst corporation over the likes of rape-covering Halliburton, planet-destroying BP, and the persistently terrible Bank of America.
I don't have to point out how out of touch the verdict of this (arguably meaningless) poll is, but it just goes to show that in numbers, angry customers can be a menacing force.
That said, I'm not going to defend their vote. It takes a lot of selective reasoning to pin all of the videogame industry's problems on one company alone, when so many others—including every single one of EA's main competitors—have the exact same practices with DLC, promotion, and online passes. Some, like Activision-Blizzard, even go a step further with subscription-based services like Call of Duty Elite. And yet, despite all this, every company—even Activision, and of course EA—has its redeeming qualities. Notably, the games they make are good, and those are the reasons why we, as customers, keep spending our money on them.
None of these videogame companies—not EA, nor any other—is extorting us. None of them are causing us to lose our homes, our dignity, or our livelihoods.
Let's try to keep things in perspective.
