The COO of EA, Peter Moore, has written a blog post about consumer opinion on the company. His view?
“We can do better. We will do better.”
Moore's words come in light of the news that EA looks likely to win the Consumerist's “Worst Company in America” award for its second year in a row. EA has made it to the semifinals and only a vote stands between it and Ticketmaster; if it makes it through this round and then wins the finals, it'll be the first company to ever receive the title twice.
Of course, Moore spends a large part of his blog post addressing the meaninglessness of such a contest. For one thing, as he rightly points out, the votes will sway in favour of (well, against really) those companies whose audience spends a lot of time online.
But he has another reason for why EA receives so much hate, a favourite saying of his:
“The tallest trees catch the most wind.”
It sounds a little arrogant, but it is undoubtedly true that EA is a big company, and that big companies are under a lot of scrutiny. Besides, Moore has further defence to provide. While he says that some complaints levied against his company are “100 percent legitimate” (without actually telling us which complaints those are), others are just not true. Essentially, Moore would like you to know that:
- SimCity's “always on” is not a DRM scheme.
- Origin has 45 million registered users.
- Tens of millions of people play and love free-to-play games and games with micro-transactions.
- That EA chose a cover athlete you don't like for Madden NFL does not make it a bad company.
- EA is “not caving” on its decision to allow players to create LGBT characters in its games.
Moore goes further, talking about the hundreds of millions of people who play EA games, “literally, hundreds of millions more than will vote in this contest”. Things are just swell over at EA, he wants us to know. But he's obviously a little worried, or he wouldn't have written this blog post. Has it made you feel any better about the company?
