We Can Do Better
ea.com
We Can Do Better
1–10 of 121 posts
Re: We Can Do Better
#2Can they do better? If so, why aren't they, and how do they propose to do so? Nice to see they realize that everyone hates them... Now if only they'd provide something other than useless rhetorical spin. Good example of how NOT to run a company.
Re: We Can Do Better
#3They could've "done better" by actually saying what they will do to improve things. This was an absolutely atrocious PR piece. It didn't address any of the issues people were having.
"45 million registered users are proving them wrong."
Such a goofy and useless statistic. When you require registration for your products, that doesn't mean people are satisfied users of your service, it means you got a lot of people to sign up. It's not an accurate metric for how many people actually enjoy and use the service.
Continuing...
"Some people think that free-to-play games and micro-transactions are a pox on gaming. Tens of millions more are playing and loving those games."
Again: just because you have a bunch of people willing to pay you money for your crap, doesn't mean it isn't crap and you couldn't be doing better.
This sort of defense mechanism doesn't even address the problems people are having. It's almost insulting to everyone who does, legitimately, have a gripe with EA as a company. Those folks angry with EA's principles, games, or for simply not getting the value of what they paid are being cast aside.
It's extremely obvious they're less concerned with addressing issues and more concerned with telling everyone about how many users they have or what their sales are:
"But here’s the truth: each year EA interacts with more than 350 million gamers; Origin is breaking records for revenue and users; The Simpsons: Tapped Out and Real Racing 3 are at the top of the mobile charts; Battlefield 3 and FIFA are stunning achievements with tens of millions of players; and SimCity is being enjoyed by millions of passionate fans all over the world."
It seems possible to paraphrase the entirety of this press release: "We recognize a lot of people hate us, but hey, we've got a lot of other people paying us who aren't you, so we can't be that wrong, can we?"
Re: We Can Do Better
#4> This is the same poll that last year judged us as worse than companies responsible for the biggest oil spill in history, the mortgage crisis, and bank bailouts that cost millions of taxpayer dollars.
Thing is, customers don't have a love-affair with the products of those other companies. We do with EA's products at their best. A great game is a treasure, personal, forming great experiences and memories in almost the same way a child or puppy does.
So when a game maker fails so epically, betrays their customers so thoroughly and completely, it tends to spark a serious reaction. A reaction more akin to a friend betraying you and selling you out.
As for oil spills: I can envision how that might happen through mere incompetence and laziness. I have more trouble envisioning how EA can do what they've been doing through mere incompetence; it's far more baffling than that.
Re: We Can Do Better
#5I stopped reading right here:
"Many continue to claim the Always-On function in SimCity is a DRM scheme. It’s not. People still want to argue about it. We can’t be any clearer – it’s not. Period."
He's flat out lying. I have no interest whatsoever in what he is saying. SimCity can technically run offline, gamers want to run it offline, but EA won't let you run it offline because you could then pirate their software. They should just demonstrate some courage and admit it.
Re: We Can Do Better
#6While there are a few valid points raised, by and large this screed reminds me of the last time I worked in IT in a large bank, and took the annual employee satisfaction survey.
The IT function had the poorest scores across the entire bank, and the CIO took quite a bit of heat for it from the rest of the CxOs.
His approach to tackle the poor employee satisfaction scores was to call an IT-wide "town hall" and explain to each of us why we were wrong in being dissatisfied...
Re: We Can Do Better
#7Spin 101: Muddy up the legitimate complaints about Origin and the fumbled SimCity launch with anecdotes about conservatives carpetbombing the company with hate mail regarding LGBTQ playables. Notice that was the last bullet point; you move forward to the next paragraph thinking "wow, that's terrible," and you're shocked enough about that to start forgetting the first bullet points. The next paragraph then doubles down on the LGBTQ hate. You've completely forgotten the SimCity bullet point now.
Oh yeah, and without you realizing it, he just lightly compared your complaints about SimCity always-on to gay bashing and not liking the choice of a cover athlete for a sports game. Apparently, EA considers all of them equally frivolous. How 'bout that, huh?
This is a pretty good example of how to tell your customers that they're wrong but not leave them feeling like you did so (he did get pretty direct on the DRM point, though, which is interesting). Just look at the love pouring in on the comments over there already, which shows you that it's working in the general case. Not to mention completely omitting what you're going to do about the problems, but cleverly disguising the omission itself.
A final thought, all of that aside: If I were Will Wright, I'd be genuinely sad about what happened to SimCity regardless of the circumstances of the Maxis sale. He left EA in 2009, which makes you wonder how long this SimCity has been in development; I'd wager about three years. That's a hallowed franchise in gaming, in my opinion, a unique IP that stood among the ranks of Civilization in its own way for many years and spawned really fun games like SimTower and SimAnt, and after this it will never be the same.
Re: We Can Do Better
#8I stopped reading right here: "Many continue to claim the Always-On function in SimCity is a DRM scheme. It’s not. People still want to argue about it. We can’t be any clearer – it’s not. Period." He's flat out lying. I have no interest whatsoever in what he is saying. SimCity can technically run offline, gamers want to run it offline, but EA won't let you run it offline because you could then pirate their software.…
I suspect the argument is more "It's not DRM, it's amazing social interaction, that benefits everyone!" (read: Nobody would use it if it was optional)
Re: We Can Do Better
#9While there are a few valid points raised, by and large this screed reminds me of the last time I worked in IT in a large bank, and took the annual employee satisfaction survey. The IT function had the poorest scores across the entire bank, and the CIO took quite a bit of heat for it from the rest of the CxOs. His approach to tackle the poor employee satisfaction scores was to call an IT-wide "town hall" and explain…
I agree. The whole letter is one of the best documentations of large-corporation dysfunctional defensiveness I've ever seen.
It's perfect. And not in a good way.
The sad thing is that by putting something so self-deluded and defensive out in public, he's guaranteeing a death spiral for corporate morale and corporate recruiting. It's awful leadership.
Re: We Can Do Better
#10The basic message seems to be: We're doing fine in terms of strategy, if not execution.
The mea culpas are limited to basically fumbling implementation details: games falling short of expectations, server end-of-life schedules, the botched SimCity launch. But not the fact that SimCity is always-online (which we're told is not DRM), or the question whether games need to be set up in a way that EA has the ability to disable multiplayer functionality.
Those are strategic decisions, which like F2P games and micropayments and building their own online distribution platform, they are on the right path. Putting those issues along with different sorts of controversies such as LGBT content in games seems a bit odd.
All in all, the opposite of an apology, really.