BF2S Forums EA is voted worst company in America (for 2nd consecutive time)

Well, who could have ever predicted this?

As soon as it was announced that EA was again nominated for Consumerist’s Worst Company in America bracket, it was almost certain they’d win just like they did last year.

And they have won, yet again. This time they beat out Bank of America for the crown, while Ticketmaster and Comcast rounded out the final four.
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Is it deserved? No. If we’re being honest, it’s not. There are dozens of companies that are technically, legitimately, actually worse than EA in terms of how much harm they directly cause people, and many of them are on this list. Rather, Consumerist’s poll doesn’t gauge this. Instead, it’s a measure of how annoyed the internet is with a certain brand at the moment.

For as long as this contest is about that, EA is sure to be victorious unless they make some major changes.

Links from a hundred gaming sites and countless threads on forums like /v/, NeoGAF and Reddit all but ensured EA’s victory here from day one. It was never going to be close, and EA won this year with 78% of the vote. There are simply not enough equivalent communities on the internet where people go to complain about Bank of America‘s fee structures or United’s carry-on bag policies en masse, except of course Consumerist itself.

EA could see their future in the tea leaves this time around, and began to fight the PR war early. The result was a quasi-apology from COO Peter Moore. Sure, he said things like the company “made plenty of mistakes” and that they “owe gamers a better performance,” but it’s the rest of what he said that only angered the public more.

He chalked up the company’s performance in the poll to those convinced that SimCity’s always-on requirement is for DRM reasons. It isn’t, he says, but no one, fans or press, believe that. He also says that people are upset about who EA chose for the cover of Madden, and they’ve also been nominated as Worst Company because hate groups are upset that they include gay and lesbian characters in their games.

The press all simultaneously pushed back against this piece (our own Erik Kain did a great job of it), but Consumerist itself came out and declared that no one writing in to nominate EA for Worst Company ever even mentioned Madden’s cover or EA’s support of the gay community.

What are the real issues? Well, the same ones that came up last year, though EA has only doubled down on many of them. There’s always-on DRM, which caused the SimCity launch to be one of the biggest gaming disasters in recent memory. EA will never convince players that requiring an internet connection for the game was mandatory for the game to work, because that sentence simply doesn’t make sense. Games have had offline and online modes for eons, and forcing a game to only be played online is either A) a shrewd DRM decision or B) a poorly designed way for a game to function, especially one many people want to play alone.