EA Executives Delusional And Puerile

This is a follow-up to the SimCity 2013 entry, here explaining why the game came out the why it did. In the next entry, it will be the turn of Microsoft and its persistence of folly.

Senior executives are sociopaths who live in a world of their own, pretending to do whatever their job is supposed to be until it is obvious that the business is too sclerotic and cumbersome to be profitable. (Usually: Microsoft is a special case, where a sclorotic and cumbersome company can still be profitable despite itself — which was Bill Gate's evil plan all along.) Then they cash out, leaving the suckers clueless middle-management behind.

Such is the case with ea. It is certain that ea's senior executives are delusional, as reported in this article and this article. To summarize the articles, ea has ascended over callous health insurance companies like Anthem, corrupt banks like BA and defiling oil companies like BP to become the most hated corporation in America, according to the latest poll of The Consumerist.

However, ea senior executives cannot see that. They do not want to see that. To let themselves see that is to admit that they are incompetents. And that hurts a great deal, especially if your egos are already swollen. All they can think about in response is We don't care what you all think, because we are successful, and you're all gay-bashers. So niener niener niener! In other words, ea executives are both delusional and puerile.

I would like to quote the last three paragraphs of the PA Report article to show just how much trouble ea is, and how little its senior executives know or care. That would be questionable under fair use, so I will cut the quote down to the last two:

Until ea stops sucking the blood out of games in order to make uninspiring sequels, or at least until they begin caring about how much gamers hate their lack of respect for our money and intelligence, this is going to continue. We don't hate them because we're homophobes. We hate them because they destroy companies we love. We hate them because they release poor games. We hate them because they claim our hate doesn't matter as long as we give them our money.

The tallest trees catch the most wind, Moore wrote. At ea we remain proud and unbowed. I have bad news for Peter Moore: Activision is the tallest tree, and people are actually buying their games. ea is fast becoming kindling, and the company ignores its customers throwing matches at its peril.

— EA earned hatred …, Penny Arcade Report.

Peter Moore is the chief operating officier at ea. He is not the one who got flushed out the golden waste hatch as a scapegoat. He is the one with the stupid analogies: The tree that catches the most wind is the one that is torn out by the roots, as would know anyone who has read the Æsopian story of the oak and the reed.

As for the gay-bashing taint, the actual slander of gays comes from ea itself: ea thinks it does gay people a favor by putting them in really bad games, but in fact it associates gay people with really bad games. And then there is the use of gays to give ea that self-righteous holier-than-thou aura once reserved for redneck preachers and old ladies in tennis shoes. ea thinks it will give it protection from criticism.

See, Peter, the thing is that if you're trying to combat the idea that your company is the most horrific of them all, it's probably best not to attempt to falsely co-opt the plight of those actually suffering true prejudice against their nature just to drum up sympathy. As someone fairly in-tune with both gaming news and politics, let me assure Moore and everyone else reading this that any attempt at backlash over gay characters in games like Mass Effect was a complete non-starter. In fact, there seemed to be a much bigger backlash against the earlier games not including those characters. It's one of the things I'm most proud of my generation, that the tide is finally turning against bigotry for our brothers and sisters in the LGBT community. Moore's attempt to use their suffering to shield ea from criticism is beyond shameful.

— EA COO: We Get Votes …, Techdirt.

The idea that the tide is turning in the eyes of someone who does not live in what urban apelings like him call flyover country is non-topic. The point is that Moore and his fellow sociopaths are using victimhood as a shield to deflect criticism of their incompetence. If that is not contempible, what is?

In hindsight, the failure of SimCity 2013 should have surprised nobody given the failure of SimCity Societies back in 2008. The most hated company in America today (ea) teamed with another hated company (BP) to create a corporate propaganda tool — in effect, a BP commercial — badly disguised as a video game. The inability of ea to learn anything from that failure presages for ea failure after failure after failure, until Wall Street sees reason and cuts off ea's capital to make it stop, or to make it die, whichever.