Vapourware LOL ELECTRONIC ARTS: The EA Thread

[Commissar Draco]

they should just blame themselves for their stupidity and eat shit.

What PR firm do you work for? Fuck the consumer and all.

Iron Tower Studios.

 

[Minttunator]

Congrats to EA on another well-deserved award!

The amount of butthurt over this around the intertubes is rather surprising, though - I didn't think EA had so many fanboys.

 

[AngryEddy]

Congrats to EA on another well-deserved award!

The amount of butthurt over this around the intertubes is rather surprising, though - I didn't think EA had so many fanboys.

The majority of them are paid bloggers. Wasn't there a list on the Codex, with companies that hired these undercover, viral, internet campaigns?

 

[Kane]

Oh boy, to see that amount of

alone is totally worth it.

well, some of them have a point. a shitty vidya gaem company winning 2 consecutive shittiest company in america awards distracts from the real shitters, like multinational oil & gas companies or banks playing roulette with your savings in the international casino. it's reflective of the pervasive shallowness with which issues of the 21. century are handled.

 

[Kane]

guyz, guyz! EA is the only company willing to invest into RPG, guyz! https://twitter.com/stillgray

Ah, Down Syndrome in its full two-digit IQ glory. Saving this.

One question though, just who the fuck is this Ian Miles Cheong guy anyway? I keep seeing him and his shit, and I'm really getting curious. inb4 I'll regret asking.

http://www.rpgcodex.net/gallery.php?image=491

Ian is @Exitium, REX and Sol Invictus???

 

[Angthoron]

Yes.

 

[TalesfromtheCrypt]

Well the fact it's given out by an organisation called "the consumerist" and not the World Social Forum should tell you that this isn't a political award, it's strictly about customer service and the way a company treats its customers. Multinational oil and gas company maybe evil or not, but (apart from high prices that are not solely their fault but also caused by taxes etc.) they aren't exactly known to royally fuck over their customers with schemes like "Sir, I'm sorry your car can't move despite having been fueled up at our gas station. Your car's board computer will first have to connect to our online servers in order to confirm that the fuel wasn't stolen. Unfortunately our servers are down for the next 5 days. No I cannot give you a refund, but I can offer you a free coffee for your waiting time".

All those "LOL HOW CAN U VOTE EA WORST COMPANY OF AMERICA HITLER WAS SO MUCH WORSE!!" arguments completely miss the point.
I mean arguing you don't deserve the award because it should have been given to fucking Blackwater? Really?

 

[Hoaxmetal]

Oh boy, to see that amount of

alone is totally worth it.

well, some of them have a point. a shitty vidya gaem company winning 2 consecutive shittiest company in america awards distracts from the real shitters, like multinational oil & gas companies or banks playing roulette with your savings in the international casino. it's reflective of the pervasive shallowness with which issues of the 21. century are handled.

Yes, because voting on the internets for some poll changes anything.

 

[Dexter]

Well the fact its given out by a organistaion called "the consumerist" should tell you that this isn't a political award, it's strictly about customer service and the way a company treats its customers. Multinational oil and gas company maybe evil or not, but (apart from high prices that are not solely their fault but also caused by taxes etc.) they aren't exactly known to royally fuck over their customers with schemes like "Sir, I'm sorry your car can't move despite having been fueled up at our gas station. Your car's board computer will first have to connect to our online servers in order to confirm that the fuel wasn't stolen. Unfortunately our servers are down for the next 5 days. No I cannot give you a refund, but I can offer you a free coffee for your waiting time".

All those "LOL HOW CAN U VOTE EA WORST COMPANY OF AMERICA HITLER WAS SO MUCH WORSE!!" arguments completely miss the point.

Finally someone who gets it They even said so themselves: http://consumerist.com/2013/04/05/e...-success-on-homophobes-and-whiny-madden-fans/

"This is the same poll that last year judged us as worse than companies responsible for the biggest oil spill in history," writes Moore. He's obviously referencing the 2011 champ BP, except BP wasn't even in the bracket last year. In response to Moore's statement, we'd like to take a moment to explain that our "Worst Company in America" contest exists within the context of this website, which is about consumers and their relationship to the marketplace and to businesses. Just to be clear: The point of this contest, now in its 8th year, is to enable consumers to send a message to a company that provides goods or services to them. Winning this contest means your customers are trying to tell you something. And that something is that you, out of all the companies, most deserve a plastic poop trophy.

People should also consider that the "Bank of America" is an American bank, while the Poll is open to everyone Worldwide (for better or worse), most of which have either never had to deal with it in their lives or have never even heard of it before (similar to several of the other contestants like Ticketmaster or Comcast).

And just for reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Consumerist#Features
2006 Winner - Halliburton
2007 Winner - RIAA
2008 Winner - Countrywide Financial (now Bank of America Home Loans) <-- this is the year the housing crisis happened
2009 Winner - AIG
2010 Winner - Comcast
2011 Winner - BP <-- this is the year the oil spill actually happened
2012 Winner - Electronic Arts
2013 Winner - Electronic Arts

EA is also I believe the first company stupid enough to release public statements of denial or denigration for their winning of the contest (because all the same places that people visit to get game news will also report on this), most of the others (who have more serious shit to deal with like constant lawsuits and government penalties) would have utterly ignored it.

 

[Angthoron]

Actually, does the whole world have access to the vote, or is it IP-range limited to the US? I've obviously not voted so I've no idea but it'd be a little weird to let outsiders vote on this. Obviously even then a VPN or a proxy is enough to solve this, but most normal people just wouldn't bother.

And yeah, it's a way for customers to reach their shitty service provider, people that are upset someone that "deserves" to be having that award should shut the fuck up, did they vote on what deserves to be the winner, did they tell their friends to do so? No? Well lol, this is how democratic voting works my darlings.

 

[Minttunator]

Yeah, it's really not possible to compare EA to banks or oil companies based on how much real-world damage they cause - simply because they're in a different business. We have to look at their badness in the right context. I'm sure EA, when compared to other gaming companies, is at least as bad as, say, BoA when compared to other banks.

I think someone from the comments on the article in Forbes put it well:
"EA CAN NOT cause massive oil spills or home foreclosures, it’s literally impossible for them to do so. You have to think of it from a “what if they were a ” perspective. If they ran a bank, they’d make you pay $100 to use the atms at all, and charge a $1 just to walk in the door/talk to a teller."

 

[Kane]

Oh boy, to see that amount of

alone is totally worth it.

well, some of them have a point. a shitty vidya gaem company winning 2 consecutive shittiest company in america awards distracts from the real shitters, like multinational oil & gas companies or banks playing roulette with your savings in the international casino. it's reflective of the pervasive shallowness with which issues of the 21. century are handled.

Yes, because voting on the internets for some poll changes anything.

that's precisely why people vote EA

gets to show how worthless the internet is or has become

 

[Kane]

I mean arguing you don't deserve the award because it should have been given to fucking Blackwater? Really?

Except that isn't my argument at all.

 

[TalesfromtheCrypt]

I wasn't referring to you, just making a general reference to the arguments being thrown around. Though (unsurprisingly) you chimed in with the stupidity with your post

 

[logicliker]

If EA were a large oil company can you imagine just how much they would fuck over everybody who needed to fill up their gas tank?

EA is CONSTANTLY setting new precedent (anti consumer of course) in this industry. Online pass, day 1 DLC, microtransactions, pre-order bullshit, and every other cheesie integrity lacking upselling technique you can possibly attach to a video game.

One of the many reasons I dislike EA with such passion is because of the hundreds of millions of dollars they spent to monopolize football video gaming. I used to wait for the new NFL or NCAAF games to come out and then choose the one with the features that I liked the best that particular year. It was healthy competition with sometimes as much as 4 different development studios competing to make a football video game that particular year. They all had the licenses to replicate those particular leagues.

That all ended when EA spent BIG (quarter of a billion dollars) to sign exclusive licenses with all of the various american football leagues (all at the same time): NFL, NCAA, Arena Football League, ESPN, etc. rendering the game companies that developed games, using those licenses, obsolete. There has been 2 non EA football games released in the last 8 years since. Only 2!

EA has used similar business tactics in other genre's as well. Basically using their ridiculous purchasing power to strong arm competitors & customers, cease control over a genre, and then ass fuck the shit out of fans/customers in those genres with a "fuck you, pay me" business strategy that we are all so familiar with today.

I google EA stock several times a month hoping to see evidence that the company is burning to the ground. When they finally do tank, there's going to be the collective sound of popped champagne corks across the globe.

 

[mastroego]

they should just blame themselves for their stupidity and eat shit.

What PR firm do you work for? Fuck the consumer and all.

Not trolling, and I'm just saying: I'm a strictly "single player" kind of gamer, and I've skipped Diablo III and Starcraft II because of the online requirement.
It's easy math to me: I won't "buy" a game (at full price) only to be able to play when and if it's acceptable/doable for the seller.

It's buyers who enable such incredible abuses, since they keep buying.
Should everyone do as I do, online requirements for single player games would vanish in a day.

 

[DragoFireheart]

Not sure who's alts they are, but I if they are not alts I approve of this incline.

 

[Dexter]

LOL poor him.
http://penny-arcade.com/report/arti...hang-yourself-bioware-co-founder-zeschuk-says
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articl...n-bioware-ea-and-the-uncertain-console-future

 

[DragoFireheart]

The amount of side-stepping he does is sickening. You know if he told the truth he'd probably be sued.

I love this bit:

Q: With EA having just lost its CEO, a number of analysts would point to Star Wars: The Old Republic being a key reason for the departure. Do you think there is any truth to that? And how does it make you feel on a personal level that people are blaming your game for John Riccitiello stepping down?

Greg Zeschuk: I'm a little disappointed by it because I don't think it's really true; there were a lot of factors. You really have to step back and look at the big picture of things at the macro level of the business. The console core sales are slowing significantly - you can't get around that fact. And the interesting thing with SWTOR, almost the only way we could have moved the needle at EA is if we were just ginormous... it's kind of funny because it is such a giant company. I can't really speak to why John's not there anymore, but it was one of many games released, and we're in a context where just a few days later it was Yoichi Wada who was booted out from Square Enix.

We are in a kind of sick market for old-school gaming - the traditional retail-based gaming - and as much as EA has moved into digital, the boxed stuff is not as robust. While digital is coming up fast it's not filling in the gaps. I think it's an easy target or oversimplification for folks who don't understand the business adequately; they don't really look at the big picture. It doesn't really bother me because the game is still running, and if you look at the references James Ohlen made at his GDC talk, it's actually doing really well as a free-to-play game.

The reality is one of the big factors for us was the business model - subscription games of that type aren't going to fly anymore. We talked internally about how it might be the last of the dinosaurs. Also, right now, there is this sort of classic innovator's dilemma where we see a new market emerging, but it's not really that great - with the mobile business, certain people make a lot of money but on the whole it's not generating as much revenue as the console business. Everyone's kind of holding out hope for the new consoles, but I honestly don't think they're going to be that big a deal. I worry a lot that unless Microsoft or Sony pull something magically out of a hat, it's pretty much the same old, same old repackaged and I don't think they're going to change the dynamic of the retail market. I don't see how they can - the market is what it is.

I like how he blames the industry like it's some sort of disease they have no control over. His separation pay must have been pretty good.

 

[Major_Blackhart]

I breezed through it and he's as hollow as everyone else at EA.

 

[Grimlorn]

they should just blame themselves for their stupidity and eat shit.

What PR firm do you work for? Fuck the consumer and all.

Not trolling, and I'm just saying: I'm a strictly "single player" kind of gamer, and I've skipped Diablo III and Starcraft II because of the online requirement.
It's easy math to me: I won't "buy" a game (at full price) only to be able to play when and if it's acceptable/doable for the seller.

It's buyers who enable such incredible abuses, since they keep buying.
Should everyone do as I do, online requirements for single player games would vanish in a day.

That's why there are consumer protection laws. To protect stupid people from themselves.

 

[Rake]

 

[Delterius]

@mastroegoThis isn't trolling in any part of the Codex.

 

[Curious_Tongue]

Should everyone do as I do, single player games would vanish in a day.

Fixed

 

[Rahdulan]

The amount of side-stepping he does is sickening. You know if he told the truth he'd probably be sued.

I don't know why, though. Didn't he pretty much leave the industry altogether? What possible sway could EA have on him a this point unless he signed some crazy NDA paper before leaving Bioware? If there's anyone in a perfect position to say how things really are it's him. Also yeah, it's totally a coincidence that every developer ever bought out by EA™ went to shit. Total coincidence and EA™ most surely had nothing to do with it.