EA admits ‘Worst Company in America’ gong hurt

Being labelled as the Worst Company in America two years on the trot caused EA to alter the way it operated.

Although Peter Moore’s public tte–tte with The Consumerist in April was probably ill advised, head of console and PC games development Patrick Soderlund told Kotaku that it has led to some concrete changes.

"When we got [the award] the second time around, if you don’t think about it as an executive in the company, you probably are not doing the right thing," he said.

"We started thinking about how we don’t want to be viewed as the worst company in America. I personally don’t think we’ve ever been the worst company in America, but it says something. The consumers out there are telling us something. And we actually took it very seriously.

We and [EA chief operating officer] Peter Moore and a couple of other guys in the executive company got together to try to understand what caused people to say these things. And there were some things out there that consumers told us they didn’t like. Online pass was one thing."

EA’s Online Pass was scrapped the following month.