Employee tears EA a new hole for SimCity

[Stukov]

http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertco...public-letter/

“To the executives at EA, from one of your employees

I am deeply embarrassed by the troubled launch of Sim City and I hope you are too. When I walk around our campus and look at the kind of talent we’ve collected, the amenities we have access to and the opportunities working at such a big company affords us, I can’t imagine how for release after release, EA continues to make the same embarrassing, anti-consumer mistakes. We should be better than this. You should not be failing us so badly.

Another thing I see when I walk around our campus are massive banners that display what are said to be our company values. They are on posters on every floor, included in company-wide emails and hanging above the cafeteria in bright colors. You even print them on our coffee mugs so we see them every day. But somehow when planning the launch of Sim City, you threw them all out the window.

Most important of the values you are ignoring is Think Consumers First. What part of the Sim City DRM scheme, which has rendered the game unplayable for hundreds of thousands of fans across the globe, demonstrates that you are thinking about consumers before you are thinking about yourselves? Does “first” mean something different in boardrooms than it does to the rest of us? Does the meaning of that word change when you get the word “executive” in front of your title?

You can’t even pretend that you didn’t know consumers would be angry about this. Common sense aside, consumers complained about this during your public betas. In fact, when one of them posted his criticisms on the forums, he was banned! You tried to silence your critics. The same thing is happening now as users write in to demand refunds. What part of this behavior aligns with our company value to Be Accountable?

What you’ve demonstrated with this launch is that our corporate management does not believe in our core values. They are for the unwashed masses, not for the important people who forced this anti-consumer DRM onto the Sim City team. This DRM scheme is not about the consumers or even about piracy. It’s about covering your own asses. It allows you to hand-wave weak sales or bad reviews and blame outside factors like pirates or server failures in the event the game struggles. You are protecting your own jobs at the expense of consumers. I think this violates the Act With Integrity value I’m looking at on my own coffee mug right now.

On behalf of your other employees, I’d like to ask you to fix this. Allow the Sim City team to patch the game to run offline. If Create Quality and Innovation is still a core value that you believe in, then this shouldn’t be a hard decision. Games that gamers can’t play because of server overload or ISP issues are NOT quality. Be Bold by giving the consumers what they want and take accountability for the mistake.

Finally I’d like to ask you to follow the last company value on the list in the future: Learn and Grow. When you made this mistake with Spore, the company and all your employees suffered for it. You didn’t learn from that mistake and you are making it again with Sim City.

So please, learn from this debacle. Don’t do this again. Grow into better leaders and actually apply our company values when you make decisions. Don’t just use them as tools to motivate your staff. With the money, talent and intellectual property available to EA, we should be leading the industry into a golden age of consumer-focused game publishing. Instead we’re the most reviled game publisher in the world. That’s your fault. Things can only change if you actually start following the company values and apply them to every title we launch.

Sincerely,

A Disappointed But Hopeful Artist at EARS”

[nhlkoho]

He'll be fired tomorrow

[Th3Guardian]

Weird...

[tsunami231]

Originally Posted by nhlkoho

He'll be fired tomorrow

I would not be shocked if ea did this once find out who it was, EA has been anti consumer for years.

And letting out bad products for years longer. See EA was once great, But this was LONG ago before they started buying out game company after game company and gutting the company and destroying game franchise after franchise.

[h0d]

Well, eum, great words but too late ? I don't think it will change anything from now, the EA reputation is kinda hurt forever.

[freeZ]

Wow...

Tisk, tisk EA - even your own employees hate you.

[BarryB]

Originally Posted by nhlkoho

He'll be fired tomorrow

Tomorrow? I bet the doors are swinging NOW

[dark_surge]

This guy is awesome. Instead of leaving his balls at the door of EA when he was hired and just shutting up and being a good employee he stayed true to his beliefs and called them out for the shameless exploitation of their customers and employees. If there were more men like this working in the big corporations we'd see much less deceitful executives and more consumer friendly practices. Unfortunately, more people prioritize their job over their dignity and/or releasing honest products.

[Luumpy]

If EA had any collective brains they would promote this Guy/Gal immediately.

[BarryB]

The sad fact is that the majority of EA Employees probably couldn't express themselves like that person did because they have families and mortgages, if found out then that would really put them in financial hell if EA did fire them for it. This person probably doesn't care he could be found out or be fired so expressed his views.

[lucidus]

That's almost a week old.

[The Laughing Ma]

Knowing EA I wouldn't be surprised if this was actually a publicity move, think about it you've pissed off a huge amount of your customers so now you have them all thinking everyone at EA is the devil but if you release an 'email from an irate employee' suddenly you have something that shows that not everyone at EA is the devil, their are people that care how can I hate EA completely while they have people like this working for them. The weird thing is their is no info about how this email came to light?

Simcity has to officially go down as the worst game launch ever, every day more and more info comes out about the disaster that is this games launch, now we are being told that the game doesn't even need the on line component, when only two days ago we were being told that the game can't function without. Everything about this launch shows one of two things

1). The folk at EA really do not have a clue what they are doing, at all or
2). They have so little respect for their consumers that they think they can openly lie and we would never find out.

[Silent_Takedown]

I'd love this to be real but I also can't help thinking the same as The Laughing Ma, that it's a stunt by EA. If this is real, then great and well done Mr employee for speaking out but sadly it won't change anything, EA won't learn from this and by learn I mean won't give two hoots about the poor launch of Sim City and consumer outcry and they will keep on doing what they're doing.

[lucidus]

In a few More days most will probably forget about it. End result? More BS in future titles.

[CronoGraal]

Originally Posted by The Laughing Ma

Knowing EA I wouldn't be surprised if this was actually a publicity move

I was thinking the same thing. Either way, EA won't change. They somehow manage to take a huge dump on every developer they touch. Look at NFS, Dragon Age, Mass Effect, Dead Space, apparently SimCity and C&C.

**** EA.

[Zunaro]

EA has sucked, forever, I still do not buy their products after 5 years. And I won't buy any of their new products, no matter how fancy.

Edit: They are ConsoleMongers.

[KarAzrael]

Battlefield 2 was great. Bad Company 2, Battlefield 3 have all been nothing but disappointing. I will not buy battlefield 4 until I know its as good as Battlefield 2.

[proFits]

Originally Posted by KarAzrael

Battlefield 2 was great. Bad Company 2, Battlefield 3 have all been nothing but disappointing. I will not buy battlefield 4 until I know its as good as Battlefield 2.

I don't see how Battlefield 3 was disapointing, having played over 300 hours online of the game I can tell you had had at least 100h of it of ''Holy sh**'' moments. The jets were awesome, and infantry combat (no explosives map only).

Sure it's not your cookie cutter CoD, but it was an excellent game.


On the EA front, I'm not buying SimCity, I've been playing City Simulator instead, it's more difficult but at least it doesnt make me feel like I'm selling my soul.

[daffy101]

I doubt this is real the way it is written just seems wrong somehow, If said employee was that fed up surely he would have left EA by now?
The programmers were just as guilty as the EA executives for making such a P**s poor product. All EA seem to do now is add another version of the same tired franchises. No innovation just money collection and after hearing that EA are taking about micro-transactions in all their future titles I hope everyone responsible for that idea and who goes along with it burns in Hades along with their families and pets for all eternity. Vote with your wallet leave them to crash and burn.

[Denial]

Originally Posted by daffy101

I doubt this is real the way it is written just seems wrong somehow, If said employee was that fed up surely he would have left EA by now?
The programmers were just as guilty as the EA executives for making such a P**s poor product. All EA seem to do now is add another version of the same tired franchises. No innovation just money collection and after hearing that EA are taking about micro-transactions in all their future titles I hope everyone responsible for that idea and who goes along with it burns in Hades along with their families and pets for all eternity. Vote with your wallet leave them to crash and burn.

How are the programmers guilty? They don't make decisions on DRM or feature cuts for zero day DLC. Hell I doubt even the lead designer makes those decisions. Look at Dustin Browder, the amount of **** he talked about EA after leaving for Blizzard was hilarious -- and he was the lead dev behind two of their most successful games. He had absolutely no control over the product beyond the actual gameplay, including feature patches which were limited to two per product.

[Loobyluggs]

EA is a machine. Not human.

They run their company as such, especially with all of their "CONFORM" slogans everywhere, like this employee has said.

Worked at places like that and it's kinda sad to see everyone else try and be 'employee of the month' for no gain.

Hate to say it, but this type of management style actually works; because it's easier to get everyone to conform to your way of thinking than it is to hire people who will think the same way you do.

It's so double-edged though. You got these slogans everywhere, but as this employee says, you then contradict yourself with your attitude to consumers and back-office practices designed to line investors pockets than create award winning games. If anyone speaks out, you can then throw all the slogans at them and repeat time after time the "...don't you want to make the best games in the world?...why don't you get with the program?...everyone here loves working here, why do you have a problem?..." and they will generally get in line and go with it.

On the other hand, we have Valve.

The run a great company, but are yet to give us Episode 3...and it's been since OCTOBER 2007 that we've played Episode 2 of Gordon Freeman's adventure.

Which is better?

A BS marketing machine aimed at the lowest common denominator of gamer audiences; or a company who release games approaching Nirvana every 7 years or so?

Hate to say it, but I prefer EA in that regard. They release a lot of games, and I like most of them (albeit, with some technical issues).

I despise their style of operational management and loathe their PR spin doctoring, but they are a games publisher who are in it to make money.

I respect that. Same as I respect Starbucks, even though they are probably taking food out of people's mouths somewhere in Coffee producing countries.

[Mannerheim]

EA is decease of gaming industry.