Peter Moore weighs in on EA being voted the 'worst company in America" for the second year in a row
"We owe gamers better performance than this."
EA chief operating officer Peter Moore has responded to over a quarter million voters naming EA the "worst company in America" for the second year in a row on Consumerist's annual poll.
Moore brushed off most of these accusations as generic internet rage over whatever's popular and noted that much of this negativity emanated from conservative organisations urging users to vote against EA due to its LGBT-friendly policies.
"We're seeing posts on conservative web sites urging people to protest our LGBT policy by voting EA the Worst Company in America," said Moore in a statement. "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."
That being the case, Moore admitted that the publisher has made several mistakes over the last year. "I'll be the first to admit that we've made plenty of mistakes," said Moore. "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."
Moore went on to defend several of EA's policies that he felt were misunderstood.
"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," he stated.
"Some claim there's no room for Origin as a competitor to Steam. 45 million registered users are proving that wrong," he added.
Moore also claimed that tens of millions of players are loving the publisher's outpouring of free-to-play titles, despite the model drawing some ire from a certain type of gamer.
The exec noted that while EA botched Sim City's launch, over 900,000 players accepted a free game as an apology.
"We can do better. We will do better," Moore stated. "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."