Whether it’s on a console, a PC, a smartphone or tablet, hundreds of millions of people play video games every day. Yet most mainstream media covers the industry the same way it treats adult dodge ball leagues and cat fashion shows (both noble ventures, but neither of them multi-billion dollar industries). And the only time you hear legislators discuss video games is when some politician decries them as the death knell for all things righteous in the world (hint: they’re not). Now, after years of being ignored and relegated to steerage, game-players have voted to send a message to Electronic Arts and the gaming business as a whole: Stop treating your loyal customers like crap.
After more than 250,000 votes, Consumerist readers ultimately decided that the type of greed exhibited by EA, which is supposed to be making the world a more fun place, is worse than Bank of America’s avarice, which some would argue is the entire point of operating a bank.
To those who might sneer at something as “non-essential” as a video game company winning the Worst Company In America vote: It’s that exact kind of attitude that allows people to ignore the complaints as companies like EA to nickel and dime consumers to death.
For years, while movies and music became more affordable and publishers piled on bonus content — or multiple modes of delivery — as added value to entice customers to buy, video games have continued to be priced like premium goods.
There have even been numerous accusations that EA and its ilk deliberately hold back game content with the sole intent of charging a fee for it at a later date. It’s one thing to support a game with new content that is worth the price. It’s another to put out an inferior — and occasionally broken — product with the mindset of “ah, we’ll fix it later and make some money for doing so.”
New, independent game companies do pop up all the time, but the cost of entering the market has historically been too expensive, making these indie innovators prime targets for acquisition by mega-publishers like EA. Our hope is that the growth of app-based gaming and downloadable games will continue to make it easier for developers to get their products out without the backing of companies that don’t care a lick about the people who fork over their cash.
Oh well, Worst Company In America 2012 is officially in the books. All that’s left to do is send off the Golden Poo to EA.
Traditionally, the Poo has been delivered on its little red pillow. But this year, we’ll give EA three different color options for its pillow, though in the end it’s still the same old Poo.
Thanks again to everyone who voted. See you all again in about 49 weeks!
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This is the best thing ever and a long time coming. From buying and shuttering my favorite game developers, to boycotting Xbox Live until they were allowed to use their own servers so they could bombard their players inboxes with spam and other unwanted marketing, to the crown jewel of poo that is Origin. This company is horrible. And yes EA exec, I “get” Origin. And I still HATE IT!
This is a joke.
People are losing their homes to mortgage companies. People are losing their lives trying to get healthcare.
And you choose a company that made poor Johnny frustrated because they deleted his World of Warcraft account? Really?
You need to consider some different criteria next year. Wow.
You are potentially the most condescending idiot I’ve met in the past week, and I work in an office full of condescending idiots.
You’re not even TRYING to understand the issues. You’re handwaving, saying “THIS ISN’T IMPORTANT BECAUSE IT’S JUST SOME STUPID HOBBY.” It’s a hobby that’s important to a lot of us; we grew up with it, it shaped us, moved us, touched us. It is important to US; your failure to transfer money to another bank is not. And EA is destroying the games industry, they’re twisting it into something awful, a twisted nightmare of what it used to be. I could probably name about a hundred reasons why EA deserves this award.
Maybe BoA deserved it more, but at least with BoA you can just choose not to patronize them. Not patronizing EA does nothing; they’re still setting trends in the games industry that have the potential to ruin it permanently. And the worst part is, it’s something that gets very, very little recognition. They’re corrupting our childhood and nobody gives a crap (except, literally, the Consumerist). Everybody already knows BoA is crap; this isn’t anything new. EA getting the “award” at least gets the problem some recognition.
But by all means, hand-wave it away because it’s not something that matters to you.
Agreed this is disappointing, and not a deserved “honor” for EA, though they do suck. I think an influx of disgruntled gamers skewed the vote.
BUT for those of you upset that super evil BofA didn’t win, let’s keep some perspective. Yes they do some consumer unfriendly crap. However, if you’re hating on them due to their role in the subprime mortgage fiasco, you should know they were hardly the worst offender. Besides, that was a systemic failure, not attributable to any one bank.
Oh yeah, if Bank of America won a poll on the internet, surely all of the atrocities they’ve committed would have been magically fixed! We get it, you’re upset that your meaningless vote got outweighed by other meaningless votes.
I work in the games industry, and gamers need to inform themselves a bit. EA won this contest because they are being blamed for the death of smaller game studios and trend of adding paid DLC to a game you already paid for.
However the gamers have no one to blame but themselves for this. They demand so much from video game developers that the cost of making video games has skyrocketed into ridiculous proportions requiring full-blown movie studio levels of production staff and budgets. Watch the credits for any current triple-A game title and see for yourself. Meanwhile the price of games at the store haven’t changed much, and have actually gone down if you adjust for inflation.
Any attempt by the game developer to turn a profit larger than what is needed to recoup their development costs is instantly seen as evil by the game community. Yet then the game community wonders why their favorite developers get eaten up by the companies like EA who is one of the few publishers in the industry capable of bankrolling the development of a brand new game from scratch. Their favorite “not evil” developer may have recouped their costs but has no additional funds to start a new game, thus needs to look to an investor like EA or Activision to pay their bills.
That’s the reality, and while EA may not have the best business practices in the industry, they are pretty much on par with any larger corporation in any other industry. The difference here is that in the games industry you have a community with a much larger proportion of people who don’t quite understand how the world works yet.
BofA is celebrating, as runner-up, by probably doubling the bonus to their CEO for this coming year.
EA’s draconian DRM methods earned them this award. First, they implement a computer crashing version of SecuROM in the PC game Spore, which lead to The Pirate Bay’s Boston Tea Party style protest of the Spore SecuROM DRM. A SecuROM free version of Spore was the number 1 downloaded PC game on The Pirate Bay for 12 weeks. Now, EA wants to implement “phone home” DRM, which makes you have to have an internet connection at all times if you want to play the game. If I want to play a game on a 6 hour cross country flight, I will have to pay the $13.95 fee to access the plane’s in flight wi-fi internet access or it won’t work. Screw EA!
Seriously? BOA has destroyed credit, which in effect can destroy a person’s ability to get a job, they’ve repo’d homes which do not belong to them and thrown the owner’s belongings in the city dump (keeping the best stuff for themselves), they pay zip taxes. So, EA’s messed with entertainment, big whoop. The folks BOA have screwed up often don’t have jobs to pay for games or homes to play them in.
They also won this the past two times. We get it, BoA sucks. Don’t bank with them and you won’t have to deal with them.
Problem is, you have to deal with EA if you’re a gamer whether you buy from them or not. They’re big so smaller companies copy them, and that means their horrible business practices become prevalent throughout the gaming industry. They’re like a virus.
I don’t get this either. BoA actively does evil and dishonesty. EA simply does greed, but is entirely optional. Had their customers actively rejected the nickel-and-dime DLC, it would have stopped. If they reject it now, it will stop.
Blame the lemmings, not the cliff.
Worst companies would have to be ANY cable company, ESPN, Fox News, ANY bank, any company health care related, American auto companies, Microsoft, Sony and Wal-Mart.
Gamers ARE idiots. Go on some videogame message boards and find a post about video game prices. You will find dozens of posters who will say they’ll pay anything for a game. They are happy to be ripped off. They will bring out bogus inflation figures and videogame budgets to convince you. I want to believe many are videogame company spokespeople, but I’m pretty good at sniffing any sort of shill out. The sad thing is, the industry would probably be a lot more mainstream if it brought their prices down.
The book industry is just as bad, and clueless. Barnes and Noble is a joke. The e-book and e-magazine business is ridiculously overpriced. They just don’t get it.
Well, since it’s working for them, they do get it. It’s the people who reward them with cash who don’t get it.
@Calidore, you embrace the sort of short-term thinking that plagues corporate America. No, they don’t get it, and it will hurt them in the long run. EA and the entire gaming industry is long overdue for a meeting with the DOJ.
I’m not “embracing” anything, just pointing out that the same short-term thinking that plagues corporate America also plagues the consumer side. Just as corporations hurt themselves looking for instant profits, consumers do the same thing looking for instant gratification and buying into fads. Corporations and consumers are all just people, so the same weaknesses apply.
Should have a Lifetime “Achievement” Award every year for BOA. They deserve the poo every year, I’m shocked that EA beat them, likely just because BOA is so very very obvious.
So the Golden Poo voted on and then maybe the Golden Garbage for BOA?
Yeah, no way hackers could have stuffed the ballets. I had no trouble voting multiple times using different browsers. I wonder if consumerist checks IP addresses, or if they only check browser cookies.
If somebody had the time and no life, it wouldn’t be hard to write a script to vote a huge number of times.
Which type of consumer do you think is more likely to have such scripting skills? The gamer, or the home owner?
Take my money, destroy the U.S. economy but don’t you dare mess with my video gaming experience. Now maybe everyone can understand how America is messed up. Pretty clear we have our priorities a little skewed. I actually think the Consumerist should follow Keith Olberman’s “Worst Person in the World” approach with the worst company. Everyday is worst company day at the Consumerist. Maybe someone should keep a tally of how many posts for each company. I guess if you did that BofA would have been the clear winner.
Next time can can we have voting for all pairs be done at the same time, and have a vote on ALL pairs be required for that person’s votes to count at all?
That would help eliminate the Kotaku/Joystiq effect that many people are viewing as skewing the results.
For shame.
Anyone who voted for EA knows nothing about the games industry since about 2004. EA turned over a new leaf and did everything in there power to do good by funding indie games, creating new IPs, treating there staff correctly and have suffered as a result with there stock and profits the lowest they have been in a while.
Lets kick them while they are down true evil companys like Zynga and Activision are worse then EA have ever been.
Activision screwed over Infinity Ward after creating the Call of Duty Franchise and Screwed over Harmonix after they created the Guitar Hero franchise.
The Activison CEO publicly and proudly states his job is to remove the fun out of making games for his employees and to create “a company culture infused with skepticism, pessimism, and fear.”
For shame. Just just reflects how out of touch both the Consumerist and its audience are with the real world.
2004? I only gave up on them with Spore, and that was 08.
It is the additon of call of duty players in to battlefield they are mad that battlefield is killing call of duty and it will not become call of duty so they vote ea as worst company in america i am a gamer who voted BoA as worst company bbut the call of duty brats win again
I view this as appropriate in the same way that Roger Ebert reviews movies on their own merits relative to their genre and what they’re trying to do. He doesn’t judge a kids’ movie against oscar-bait dramas. If a dumb action movie is a good dumb action movie, he’ll give it a good review.
EB may not be world-shatteringly awful like the big banks. EB may not have killed anyone like the big banks absolutely have. But looking at EB versus other big game companies…they’re up against companies like Nintendo and Valve. Bank of America is up against Chase and Wells Fargo. They aren’t defying any expectations.