First off, before anyone tries to defend EA, all I'm going to say is FIFA 13 on the Wii. Yeah, epic fail right there. Oh yeah, and NHL 12 and NHL 13. Simple Google searches will leave you shaking your head and waving a finger at EA...and not the PG finger either. Anyway, in a recent conference John Riccitiello, EA's CEO, stated that consumers won't pay for crap...yet they already do.
All Things SD caught the quote from Riccitiello where the man who just a few months ago was desperately fearing for his job after the company's stock took a dive faster than Stephen Bonner in his fight with Anderson Silva. That's not to mention that this followed on poor public perception when EA won the Worst Company in America award like Steven Seagal in a pastry-pie eating contest or Jean-Claude in a line sniffing contest against Charlie Sheen: clean sweeps for the win. Anyway, Riccitiello had this to say about the competition and the business of selling games...
“The companies that are now suffering will have another day,” ...“consumers won’t pay for crap.”
Darn tooting right they won't pay for crap, so why the heck do you guys keep selling it?
Riccitiello mentioned that great gaming starts with good entertainment and not “spamming your friends to get a shovel.” Oh, burn on Zynga.
Still, this doesn't excuse EA for selling crap, and I'm not talking about their high profile games from reputable development studios. For those who don't remember (and I suspect short-term memory loss might be to blame for that) EA was caught with their wiener in the wind when for two straight game releases it was discovered that both NHL 12 and NHL 13 had “broken” features that required users to lay down real money in order to keep playing certain game modes. No fixes in sight. No patches. They just periodically hand out free boost packs while poor saps keep paying for broken crap.
Oh yeah, but they'll keep taking your money because they don't mind people paying for stuff while getting nothing in return, it's almost like voting in a President who promises fixes and delivers nothing. In other words, it's just an average night in the bedroom with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian.
And what about FIFA 13 for the Wii? Oh yeah, you didn't think we forgot about that right? If that's not the definition of paying for crap I wouldn't know what is. You're literally paying full price for FIFA 12 just with a logo change! What's worse is that EA didn't even care, they just trudged on pouring crap into the mouths of gamers, just like Dick Cheney after he found out Haliburton had poisoned American troops with tainted water: he went hunting in celebration and then shot his friend in the face.
Also, I'll just say...Scrabble.
Anyway, Electronic Arts is in the social games sector for the long haul. Right now they're trying to tear out a hole in Zynga's rectum on copyright infringement charges, but after they destroy each other in court like Honey Boo Boo is destroying the brain cells of TV viewers, EA will get back to producing that grade-A crap that they think you won't pay for. Well, I guess it's time to prove EA right and stop paying for crap, especially the kind that they produce.
