EA to be “Worst Company in America” for the 3rd time?
It’s this time of the year, when The Consumerist runs the annual contest “Worst Company in America” once again.
The process of nominations started already and will continue through 5 pm ET on Thursday, March 13. There is only one requirement for a company to be considered: it must provide their services or goods to American consumers.
You can send your nominees at this email address. However, this time you’ll have to add a reason why the nominated company should win. You can still nominate more than one company, but for each one an explanation will have to be provided.
The winner gets the prestigious Golden Poo award.
How is all this related to Electronic Arts? Well, EA managed to win two consecutive “Worst Company in America” (2012 and 2013) contests and imposes itself as a serious contender for keeping the crown for the third time in a row. No company except EA has ever managed to win the prize two times in contest’s history, let alone two times in a row.
Both of the times that EA won, the runner-up was the Bank of America but they are clearly no match for them. Some of the reasons which led customers to vote “for” EA were Mass Effect 3‘s ending, EA’s love for DLC and microtransactions, online passes, games that didn’t meet the expectations and some launch fiascos (SimCity above all).
So, what changed during the last year? Is there any chance they won’t get the “prize” this time? EA got rid of online passes and discontinued them, but they are still big supporters of DLC and microtransactions, implementing them into almost every game of theirs. Games not meeting the expectations is somewhat of a subjective matter, and honestly some of their games were well-received, but one could expect some nominations complaining about their games.
The most probable reason this year could be the infamous Battlefield 4 launch, filled with so many issues on all platforms. Servers connections lost, data loss, ingame sound not working, freezes, performance issues, crashes, not to mention poor bullet hit detection. It was obvious the game was rushed to meet its main competitor, Call of Duty: Ghosts, and more than a dozen patches didn’t quite fix everything either as Battlefield is still far from flawless, but at least DICE is now rolling out the DLCs and Premium 2XP events on time. There was even a class-action lawsuit filed over Battlefield’s buggy launch.
The rocky start and even bigger emphasis on Premium Service hurt EA’s image amongst the gamers all around the world, and it’s something that will be remembered just like Sim City’s launch fiasco, when people weren’t even able to play the game for which they paid.
Whether this is something worth of the Golden Poo award is up to you, but there is no denying that a lot people will find this worthy of “Worst Company in America”, just like in the previous years.
What’s your take on it? Did EA really deserve to win the award for two consecutive times or were they just a victim of trolling? Do they deserve the reward this time?
Will you nominate some companies and what would the reason be? Let us know in the comments.