EA Responds To Bad PR With More Bad PR

Once again, EA has received the Golden Poo, the prize given to the ‘winner’ of the Consumerist’s ‘Worst Company in America’ poll. Voted for by the site’s users, it marks the second time EA has topped the poll in as many years.

An IGN article from last year asks, “Why do people hate EA?” It’s a reasonable question. Sure, there’s the purported horrible working conditions, dishonest marketing campaigns, buying and shuttering beloved studios, intrusive microtransactions in full price games, ‘free’ to play games unplayable unless you pay, annual sequels, steadily declining game quality, Origin, online passes, making SimCity always online, flubbing the release of their always online SimCity, and flubbing their response to flubbing the release of their always online SimCity. But other than those few things, EA is a good company.

 

"The biggest turds stink the worst" (Picture: The Consumerist)

Joking aside, it goes without saying that EA are not actually the worst company in America. To gain this latest win, EA went up against companies that have done things so unpleasant, they make the SimCity debacle look like a charity fundraiser. Of course, you could argue that people who dislike EA are mostly gamers, and therefore more likely than those with contempt for other companies to be Internet users who might to vote in an online poll. However, considering EA annihilated Facebook, a truly rotten company with an enormous, entirely online user base, in the first round, it’s difficult to buy this claim. 

It should be obvious, however, that the Consumerist’s poll doesn’t really reflect the quality of any given company. Rather, it reflects that company’s ability to communicate with its customers. And while EA is probably not the worst company in America, it might have the most inept approach to public relations.

A great example of EA’s poor PR is Peter Moore's recent response to the company’s then impending victory in the Consumerist’s poll. In a blog entitled "We Can Do Better", Moore, the company's chief operation officer, seemingly offers an apology, but all he really offers is a list of excuses disguised as an apology. Moore asks:

Are we really the “Worst Company in America?”  I’ll be the first to admit that we’ve made plenty of mistakes. These include server shut downs too early, games that didn’t meet expectations, missteps on new pricing models and most recently, severely fumbling the launch of SimCity.  We owe gamers better performance than this.

At first glance it all seems very sincere, with what appears to be a genuine acknowledgement of some of EAs recent missteps and the need for it to improve. But looking closely at Moore’s euphemistic language, he comes across as oblivious as best, disingenuous at worst. “[S]everely fumbling the release of SimCity” may seem like an honest evaluation of EA’s most recent fiasco, but it’s far more pleasant than, “we released a broken product and then refused refunds for customers who’d paid for it, as well as censoring our customer care phone number in our forums to limit the numbers calling to complain”, which would be more accurate. Rather than holding his hands up and admitting EA’s mistakes, then, Moore is engaging in damage control.

Moore then goes on to make several poor arguments. He claims, for example, that SimCity’s need to be connected to the Internet is not a digital rights management (DRM) issue. In doing so, he misses the point that, regardless of what motivated it, forcing players to play SimCity online meant the game was unplayable for a huge amount of users at launch. DRM may be something that people are opposed to on ideological grounds, but the majority of players will grudgingly accept it if they are still able to play their games. A DRM free game rendered unplayable by poor design decisions (which is what Moore is arguing is the problem with SimCity) is less forgivable

Moore also defends EA’s online gaming platform, Origin, as well as the company's monetisation strategies, reeling off some impressive figures to support his argument:

Some claim there’s no room for Origin as a competitor to Steam.  45 million registered users are proving that wrong. […] 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.

45 million people may indeed be using Origin, and there’s no doubt that’s a lot, but how many of them are doing it simply because their favourite EA published games aren’t available on Steam? How many of those 10 million people ‘playing and loving’ EA’s free-to-play games downloaded them, were disgusted by the sleazy implementation of microtransactions, and never played them again? Moore is also attacking a straw man here with his ‘pox on gaming’ comment. I don’t think many gamers have a problem with free-to-play games or microtransactions in principle, just EA’s inimitably awful way of doing them.

Moore even goes as far as claiming that Conservative websites were encouraging people to vote for EA in the Consumerist’s poll to punish them for publishing games where the player can enter into same-sex relationships. While it wouldn’t surprise me if this claim were true, the Consumerist says they’ve seen no evidence of such a campaign in their traffic figures. If they’re right, it’s classless to blame dislike for your company on imaginary bigots.

EA could have handled this differently. Had Moore acknowledged the EA’s mistakes, offered a sincere apology, and talked about changes the plans to make, he might have swayed a few critics. However, Moore’s blog instead blames EA being voted worst company in America on what Chris Morran at the Consumerist calls the, “misinformed perception of your average “gamer” as a whiny, nitpicky loner who will complain about anything”. In relying on such a lazy stereotype, Moore has done little more than make EA the favourite to collect the golden poo for the third time in 2014.

@ludolinguist