Electronic Arts COO publishes an apology letter.

 I just found a letter by EA's COO Peter Moore where he apologizes for the actions of his company, and says he can do better. Find it below the break, with some commentary on it.

Statement by Peter Moore

The tallest trees catch the most wind.

That’s an expression I frequently use when asked to defend EA’s place in the gaming industry. And it comes to mind again this week as we get deeper into the brackets of an annual Web poll to name the “Worst Company in America.”

This is the same poll that last year judged us as worse than companies responsible for the biggest oil spill in history, the mortgage crisis, and bank bailouts that cost millions of taxpayer dollars. The complaints against us last year were our support of SOPA (not true), and that they didn’t like the ending to Mass Effect 3.

This year’s contest started in March with EA outpolling a company which organizers contend is conspiring to corner the world market on mid-priced beer, and (gulp) allegedly waters down its product. That debate takes place in bars – our audience lives on the Internet. So no surprise that we drew more votes there.

Let me cut to the chase: it appears EA is going to “win.” Like the Yankees, Lakers and Manchester United, EA is one of those organizations that is defined by both a legacy of success, and a legion of critics (especially me regarding all three of those teams).

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.

Some of these complaints are 100 percent legitimate – like all large companies we are not perfect. But others just don’t hold water:

Many continue to claim the Always-On function in SimCity is a DRM scheme. It’s not. People still want to argue about it. We can’t be any clearer – it’s not. Period.
Some claim there’s no room for Origin as a competitor to Steam. 45 million registered users are proving that wrong.
Some people think that free-to-play games and micro-transactions are a pox on gaming. Tens of millions more are playing and loving those games.
We’ve seen mailing lists that direct people to vote for EA because they disagree with the choice of the cover athlete on Madden NFL. Yes, really…
In the past year, we have received thousands of emails and postcards protesting against EA for allowing players to create LGBT characters in our games. This week, we’re seeing posts on conservative web sites urging people to protest our LGBT policy by voting EA the Worst Company in America.
That last one is particularly telling. If that’s what makes us the worst company, bring it on. Because we’re not caving on that.

We are committed to fixing our mistakes. Over the last three weeks, 900,000 SimCity players took us up on a free game offer for their troubles. We owed them that. We’re constantly listening to feedback from our players, through our Customer Experience group, Twitter, this blog, or other sites. The feedback is vital, and impacts the decisions we make.

I expect the debate will include a lot of comments under this post. But here’s the truth: each year EA interacts with more than 350 million gamers; Origin is breaking records for revenue and users; The Simpsons: Tapped Out and Real Racing 3 are at the top of the mobile charts; Battlefield 3 and FIFA are stunning achievements with tens of millions of players; and SimCity is being enjoyed by millions of passionate fans all over the world.

Every day, millions of people across globe play and love our games – literally, hundreds of millions more than will vote in this contest.

So here’s my response to this poll: We can do better. We will do better. 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.

The tallest trees catch the most wind. At EA we remain proud and unbowed.

The first thing I noticed was that the comments section refused to listen. To them, anyone involved in EA is not a real person, and nothing they say matters. People in companies aren't allowed to have opinions, according to these people. The excuse is always "the customer is always right," but it has been proven time and time again that the customer is not always right. There's too many customers to satisfy them all, so developers are forced to ignore them. These commenters seemed like nothing would change their mind, and they were convinced that THEY were right and HE is wrong. I try to like people, but gaming forums are the primary thing that makes it difficult. Many gamers seem to want everyone to conform to their opinions. They disagree with a review? The review must be biased or idiotic! They have trouble with a company? Any apology is double-sided and insincere! You know why no companies listen to customer feedback anymore? Because on the rare occasion that customer feedback is fair and semi-comprehensive, it's still loaded with personal attacks and impositions of personal opinions.

As for the letter itself, it's a well-written apology that actually seems to understand what most of the problems are and brings up some good points. Let's go over them.

He realizes that EA tends to shut down servers to early. There's a major complaint, with the promise of being fixed. He realizes that several games didn't meet expectations, though he seems a bit oblivious to the probability that it's due to rushing them through the door. There's another promise of improvements. In fact, if you give EA feedback without being a dick about it, they may actually listen. He addresses missteps on pricing models. This means the DLC and microtransactions. There's promise of price adjustment at the very least. I mean, they could still learn about not rushing games and being a bit more careful with day-one DLC, but there's many promises of improvements.

There has been enough statements that are absolutely positive about SimCity's always-online nature not being DRM that there must be some weight behind it.. From what I've seen, the game is built around multiplayer, and it would become very hard to play as a singleplayer game. While the game can be played offline, and actual singleplayer mode would need more effort to create, and Maxis designed the game as a social multiplayer experience. Unfortunately, the game was not prepared, and EA is trying to apologize. I saw a post that compared EA giving out free games to them intentionally running over your dog, but then giving you a new one. Not just doing it intentionally, but enjoying it and having no remorse. That's an ignorant comparison to make, but it basically sums up the gaming community on the internet in a nutshell. The free games were given out when they realized that they made a mistake and wanted to compensate for it. It's compensation for EA's mistake, and the most certain sign that they realized that they made one.

Free-to-Play games with microtransactions work when the microtransactions are handled correctly. It's been universally agreed by gamers and critics alike that EA doesn't do that, and it seems that even EA understands this. However, microtransactions on their own aren't bad. I'm certain it is very possible to make a very good free game that still has them, and makes them appealing enough to earn revenue. EA's recognition that they don't do that is a step in the right direction, and hopefully will lead to a better handling of pricing models.

EA has been associated with ridiculous prices to the point that people crack jokes about minor DLC being ridiculously expensive at an almost constant rate. These jokes annoy me, but it seems that Moore is agreeing here, with is admission that they have messed up pricing models. I don't doubt improvements are on the way.

The comment about Origin is the only one where I really think he does miss the point. Origin is much disliked because it's feature-light and necessary to play any EA games on PC. On top of that, it has been known to scan system files, and the majority of people are very protective of their privacy. He doesn't seem to be malicious about it, but he does clearly misunderstand.

The other two complaints are ridiculous at best and offensive at worst, but that should be clear to everyone. The first, complaining about the Madden cover athlete, is a hilarious thing that would probably not even need to be mentioned if it wasn't on top of everything else, and the controversy over LGBT characters in games is something that I feel is ridiculous. However, that second one is a major issue in the United States right now, and even stating my personal viewpoint may have been a dangerous move.

Moore's comment about the LGBT thing being related to why they're being voted worst company actually has justification provided, despite what many will likely say. He says that he has heard homophopic groups imploring people to vote for EA as worst company because of the LGBT characters.

Many, many EA games have been critically acclaimed. On top of that, several of their games are widely played and make a lot of money. It's his company, and its status as a gaming juggernaut is something that anyone in his position would be proud of.

I feel that EA is unfairly hated. Yes, they did a lot of questionable things. However, the cynicism shown by the gaming community comes off-to me, at least-as biased and unwilling to listen to anything a publisher has to say. If you have anything actually intelligent to say to counter this post, feel free to leave a comment. However, if you're not going to acknowledge the arguments presented here, I must ask you to keep it to yourself.