Well, they’ve done it. Electronic Arts has once again won The Consumer’s Worst Company in America, thanks to angry gamers on the internet banding together to ensure that Electronic Arts gets publicly shamed for their business practices. To understand the gravity of some of the companies that they beat, they beat the entire banking industry that led to one of the worst economic disasters America had ever seen, they beat Monsanto, the creators of Agent Orange, whose business practices have been called into question a lot recently as well as tobacco companies that literally sell death to consumers. Electronic Arts, a game publisher, has beaten all of those companies and industries out because gamers are that upset about their business practices.
It’s time to take a look at what they’ve done wrong and how they can fix it and finally win back consumers.
Less DLC
There are a couple of ways to work this out, but either less expensive DLC or just less DLC in general would be the way to go. Most games that are released by EA have somewhere in the realm of $20 – $60 in DLC that comes out, usually more towards the expensive side of things. The argument has been that this is content that wouldn’t be in the game originally, but many feel that content that fits within the game’s main campaign being released as paid DLC is a sham. Season Passes have become regular things, usually only a minor discount and it just doesn’t add up for gamers to spend double the face value of a game to get the full experience. Keep price gouging your customers and they’ll start to disappear, EA.
Less bugs and “day one patches”
You know, I think that we all understand that games are big, expansive oceans of code and that anything can go wrong with them, and that most gamers are understanding to an extent. The thing is, though, unless consumers are paying for a product that is marked as a beta, they don’t want something riddled with bugs and rushed to market. If you have to push a release date back to release a more polished game or take a team off of compiling the first round of expensive DLC to work on the core game, please do that. Isn’t it embarrassing how many games are released and require patching on day one to get it to work properly?
Support your products
While I’m not certain of the exact costs of running servers and most of us understand that running servers can be costly, as long as these products are out in the wild and still being sold new at retail, support it. It’s sad that we can’t load up a game that is two years old and use all of the intended features because Electronic Arts felt that there weren’t enough people playing it to justify keeping the lights on. Discovering old games and playing them with friends can always be fun and neutering older games just comes across as miserly.
Show that you care
There are some publishers out there that have the unconditional love of gamers across the world, maybe study what they do and take a few pages out of their book to give back to them. Gamers spend a lot of time and money invested in your products, show them that they are appreciated and there won’t be worries about being voted as the Worst Company in America.
These are just a few small examples of what Electronic Arts could do to win back the trust and respect from gamers, to avoid being put on lists like this in the future. We all know that Electronic Arts can do better, now they should do better.
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