LOL EA

Seriously... EA wants to be voted " Best company in America " ...
Battlefield 4 News - EA Want To Be Voted Best Company In America

2013 was the second year running that EA got the dubious award of being voted the “worst company in America”. You’d think with the company would be too busy, you know, publishing a vast number of games to be bothered about a little poll, but it turns out EA cares deeply about this kind of slander, and is working hard, it claims, to reverse this trend towards passionate loathing.

In fact, Patrick Söderlund, EA’s European Vice President, said this week that he wants EA not only to improve, but to be voted the best company in America…

Battlefield 4 Was Released With Numerous Bugs

“I don’t believe for a second that we are the worst company in America, but I do believe when something like that happens, you have to sit down and ask yourselves ‘Why are people saying these things?” Söderlund said, continuing “We did that and we started to realise that we are doing things that people don’t like.”

The more cynical among us might question why it took EA so long to come to that revolutionary conclusion, but the Vice President went on to underline how he felt the company was attempting better dialogue with consumers.

“We looked at something as simple as the Online Pass,” he adds. “People were telling us they didn’t like that. So we weighed up the pros and cons and went ‘Ok. We will remove it.’ These decisions need to be driven by what consumers want and tell us, and that is where we may have faltered a bit in the past.

"If we continue to do those types of things, then we will earn people’s trust and respect. We don’t want to be bad, we have no desire to be voted the worst company in America. On the contrary we want to be voted the best.”

“My goal is to be seen as the best in the business. I want people to recognise us for the games we make rather than anything else. Whether that is the Worst Company in America or whatever people don’t like. We need to be remembered and respected for the games we make.”

Whilst it’s admirable to want those who play your games to like your company, the extent to which EA can “make people like them” is questionable. The company owns numerous huge IPs, including The Sims and Fifa, and trying to please too many people can just result in a lack of risk taking and boring, safe games. Yet at the same time, the raft of EA games in recent years having been released unfinished, broken or filled with bugs - with recent release Battlefield 4 still having problems with bugs nearly a month after launch - was not an issue addressed by the Vice President, despite the fact it is one of the most repeated reasons for distrusting the publishing giant. With EA continuing to release unfinished games, it seems unlikely that the tides of popular opinion will turn their way any time soon.