EA has been voted “Worst Company in America” – Again.

For the second year in a row Electronic Arts has been voted as the worst company in America by the readers of the consumer-watchdog website The Consumerist. This makes them more hated than Bank of America, Comcast and Ticketmaster (of which took second, third, and fouth).

Despite the fierce competition this year they managed to take home the not-very coveted “Golden Poo” award. They won this because of a love of microtransactions, the price of their games and use of DLC as well as the irritating DRM practices. But the spectacular failure of the SimCity launch was a particular sore spot that was poked a few times.

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“EA made a royal mess of the SimCity release by failing to foresee that the people who would buy the game and who would, per the game’s design, be required to connect to the EA servers and might actually want to play at some point in the week after making their purchase…But that’s just the latest in EA’s long history of annoying its customer base with bad support. Customers who paid full price for games, or who spent or saved huge piles of in-game cash in EA’s online products, would suddenly find a problem with their accounts, but attempts to rectify the problem, or even get a response from EA, would go unheeded.” – The Consumerist

EA chief operating officer Peter Moore, in an open letter to gamers last week, admitted the company could do better, but said the label of “worst company” was undeserved:

“Are we really the ‘Worst Company in America? I’ll be the first to admit that we’ve made plenty of mistakes. These include server shut downs too early, games that didn’t meet expectations, missteps on new pricing models and most recently, severely fumbling the launch of SimCity. We owe gamers better performance than this. … But I am damn proud of this company, the people around the globe who work at EA, the games we create and the people that play them.”

No company wants to win an award like this, EA specifically does not need any more bad press like this amongst everything else that is going on with them. They are already dealing with more significant issues such as the CEO John Riccitiello resigning at the end of last month not to mention the fallout of the SimCity ordeal.

With all of this fueling the internet hate-bandwagon I expect to see a slew of new memes being created in regards to this. But will this actually deter anyone from buying any of EA’s new games? Battlefield 4 will be releasing later this year and there is quite a bit of excitement around it and regardless of this news gamers everywhere will be buying and playing on the “broken” servers they complain about.

Electronic Arts ditches Online Pass finally.

At long last Electronic Arts has seen the light, they have listened to the scathing fans, they have reached some form of common sense in their corporate minds. The Online Pass a.k.a. Project Ten Dollar is finally being scrapped, no seriously, it’s over. The witch is dead. She can’t get you nor your little dog now.

After 3 ridiculous years of budget minded shoppers getting the shaft on buying used games, EA will no longer shove those stupid little codes inside each new copy of their blockbuster titles. Originally envisioned as ”an effort to package a full menu of online content and services,” otherwise none as “OP Jack the Consumer” the program morphed into a way to cut used games out of the system. Instead “many players didn’t respond to the format.” And rightly so. Some people can’t drop $60 bucks down for every title and either have to wait for a sale (in which a significant time passes and often rendered the Online Pass invalid) or buy used.

“We’ve listened to the feedback and decided to do away with it moving forward.” Say what? You guys listened? I guess being named “The Worst Company in America” will do that to you, just maybe. Although let’s be real here, there are far worse companies here than Electronic Arts. Of course now we have to sit back and wonder how they’re going to gouge us. $70 games? $30 map packs? It boggles the mind!

So what you geeks think? About time or too little too late?

Game installs will be a mandatory thing on Xbox One.

No, no, no, not this again. We’re hearing from sources that the Xbox One will require gamers to be installed on the hard drive before playing is allowed. If for some reason you want to take that new game over to a buddy’s house, you would have to pay a fee to MS just to play it. The game will be tied to one Xbox Live account, no mention yet if it can be unlinked for another account.

Yeah I hate installing games to my PS3. I have a puny 80GB hard drive and it fills up quick with all the mandatory installs. Plus who wants to buy a brand new game, rush home and then wait while 5GB of data is slowly transferred to their deck? Not I that’s for sure. The Xbox One may have a 500GB drive but that sucker will fill up very fast with games, here’s hoping for TB drives.

What this seems like is Microsoft’s use of the Xbox One against the used games market. Sure EA ditches Online Passes but then someone still has to pay to play used. Stay tuned geeks as more info will eventually emerge.

EA made Dead Space 3 mining glitch intentional.

One complaint about Dead Space 3 has been the requirement of accumulation of spare gear to craft items and weapons. Sure you could always buy the stuff via micro transactions but who wants to do that? Thankfully thorough gamers found a “glitch” where in they walk into certain rooms, pick up goodies, back out and re-enter. This glitch allowed patient players to get stocked up on the random items they need without the frustrating scouring of nooks and crannys. It turns out that the “glitch” was in fact an intentional feature for Dead Space 3.

“The resource-earning mechanic in Dead Space 3 is not a glitch. We have no plans to issue a patch to change this aspect of the game. We encourage players to explore the game and discover the areas where resources respawn for free. We’ve deliberately designed Dead Space 3 to allow players to harvest resources by playing through the game. For those that wish to accumulate upgrades instantly, we have enabled an optional system for them to buy the resources at a minimal cost ($1-$3).” – EA’s Jino Talens

EA has done something a bit unexpected by allowing players to avoid spending real world cash on quick fixes. Publishers love taking small amounts of cash for impatient gamers. Glad to see that $59.99 game can stay that way for now.