EA pick up worst company award – two years in a row

We reported a couple of days ago that EA were in the running to win the Worst Company In America award and for the second year in a row, they managed to snag the prestigious title.

The news will not come as a shock to many, as Electronic Arts have proven unpopular with a very wide audience of gamers who feel the company are just out to fleece them.

The Consumerist say “Following last year’s surprise Worst Company In America victory by Electronic Arts, there was hope that the video game giant would get the message: Stop treating your customers like human piggy banks, and don’t put out so many incomplete and/or broken games with the intent of getting your customers to pay extra for what they should have received in the first place. And yet, here we are again, with EA becoming the first company to ever win a second Golden Poo from Consumerist readers.Electronic Arts took a staggering 78 percent of the overall vote to claim the award. The Consumerist break down the reasons why EA claimed the title again, saying that they have a reputation for releasing a title, just to ‘cash in' on a brand name, mentioning Dragon Age 2 and Dead Space.

Mass Effect 3 also featured in their article saying “The most obvious example was Mass Effect 3, which had the bad fortune of being released in the weeks leading up to the 2012 WCIA tournament. Fans of the first two games, who had invested large chunks of time and money, were left with an empty feeling after reaching the obviously rushed endgame. Detractors accused EA of pushing to game out too early and focusing too much of its energy on the new multiplayer side of the game, since that promised the company a revenue stream in the form of in-game microtransactions for users who want to acquire the many characters and upgrades.The reaction to ME 3 was so negative and so widely publicized, EA was compelled to release a slightly more satisfactory ending only a few months later.”SimCity was a complete embarrassment for the game giant.

Gamers have to be connected online all the time to play, and when it was launched, the online service died, meaning people who paid for the game were unable to play it, at all. This problem was so high profile for EA that Amazon pulled the game from sale and EA offered free games to customers who were burnt by the mess up.The Consumerist added “Similarly, the recent release of SimCity 5 came with the news that users would need to be connected to the Internet in order to simply play by one’s self. The company claims it is not a form of anti-piracy digital rights management (though not many people believe that), but instead is about “realiz[ing] a vision of players connected in regions to create a SimCity that captured the dynamism of the world we live in; a global, ever-changing, social world.” Translated, that means EA wants you to always be online so you’ll be encouraged to buy things from the in-game store.”Penny Arcade added “EA has become a company that releases mediocre products created by faceless teams. There is no real vision at work, no grand design. Just the idea that free-to-play games and microtransactions are the wave of the future, or at least they better be, because none of the company’s $60 boxed releases are finding much success with either critics or gamers.”You can read all this, and much more over here. It makes for very interesting reading.Kitguru says: We doubt EA will be too happy about this, even if they shake it all off as a joke, publicly.

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