SimCity. Always on DRM example of failure.

must be crack effects.

 

EA employee comes out to say a few words regarding Sim City:

“To the executives at EA, from one of your employees
I am deeply embarrassed by the troubled launch of Sim City and I hope you are too. When I walk around our campus and look at the kind of talent we’ve collected, the amenities we have access to and the opportunities working at such a big company affords us, I can’t imagine how for release after release, EA continues to make the same embarrassing, anti-consumer mistakes. We should be better than this. You should not be failing us so badly.
Another thing I see when I walk around our campus are massive banners that display what are said to be our company values. They are on posters on every floor, included in company-wide emails and hanging above the cafeteria in bright colors. You even print them on our coffee mugs so we see them every day. But somehow when planning the launch of Sim City, you threw them all out the window.
Most important of the values you are ignoring is Think Consumers First. What part of the Sim City DRM scheme, which has rendered the game unplayable for hundreds of thousands of fans across the globe, demonstrates that you are thinking about consumers before you are thinking about yourselves? Does “first” mean something different in boardrooms than it does to the rest of us? Does the meaning of that word change when you get the word “executive” in front of your title?
You can’t even pretend that you didn’t know consumers would be angry about this. Common sense aside, consumers complained about this during your public betas. In fact, when one of them posted his criticisms on the forums, he was banned! You tried to silence your critics. The same thing is happening now as users write in to demand refunds. What part of this behavior aligns with our company value to Be Accountable?
What you’ve demonstrated with this launch is that our corporate management does not believe in our core values. They are for the unwashed masses, not for the important people who forced this anti-consumer DRM onto the Sim City team. This DRM scheme is not about the consumers or even about piracy. It’s about covering your own asses. It allows you to hand-wave weak sales or bad reviews and blame outside factors like pirates or server failures in the event the game struggles. You are protecting your own jobs at the expense of consumers. I think this violates the Act With Integrity value I’m looking at on my own coffee mug right now.
On behalf of your other employees, I’d like to ask you to fix this. Allow the Sim City team to patch the game to run offline. If Create Quality and Innovation is still a core value that you believe in, then this shouldn’t be a hard decision. Games that gamers can’t play because of server overload or ISP issues are NOT quality. Be Bold by giving the consumers what they want and take accountability for the mistake.
Finally I’d like to ask you to follow the last company value on the list in the future: Learn and Grow. When you made this mistake with Spore, the company and all your employees suffered for it. You didn’t learn from that mistake and you are making it again with Sim City.
So please, learn from this debacle. Don’t do this again. Grow into better leaders and actually apply our company values when you make decisions. Don’t just use them as tools to motivate your staff. With the money, talent and intellectual property available to EA, we should be leading the industry into a golden age of consumer-focused game publishing. Instead we’re the most reviled game publisher in the world. That’s your fault. Things can only change if you actually start following the company values and apply them to every title we launch.
Sincerely,
A Disappointed But Hopeful Artist at EARS”


Personally, I think this is a ploy by EA to humanize itself and offer a different face. This narrative reads like a hollywood script for the lost CEO who is brought back to his senses by the bright youth of tomorrow.

By the way, EA's stock is dropping.
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I'd say that too, but I doubt it would say "weak sales" if it was a company puff piece. "Sales that didn't meet expectations" maybe.

 

Perhaps, or "weak sales" and "bad reviews" is a smokescreen tactic to play victim to market forces and industry criticism. Yes, this portion of the EA employee letter does seem to be scathing, but also gives credibility to the message by offering a barbed position while again, using outside forces as the impetus for these "mistakes".

Anyhow, whether this was a calculated "leak" by EA or not, this letter does play a humanzing role which puts a different face on the company. EA becomes a community of people who are instilled with great values, but somehow upper management lost it's way. The heart of this letter is the EA child begging it's Father to come home from the bar and eat with the family at supper time. It's not EA who should suffer, but single entities within. I could imagine this being the narrative which opens up to CEO public apology and a deep bow. Perhaps the shareholders will ask for a fall guy to behead publicly.

Anyhow, I may be exaggerating, but the gaming industry sites are literally buzzing with anti EA sentiment. Even their Wiki Analysis page has a scathing description claiming EA to be the worst game publisher on the planet.

 

That's been going on looooong before this train wreck.

 

Their stock had been fluctuating in micro booms and busts following an industry wide trend going south. The historic post recessionary drops in stock share prices across the gaming industry spectrum reflected less on EA's performance as publisher and more on the overall economy. Besides, if you look at the EA investors stock chart site, you'll see that EA did a tremendous job climbing out of it's hole. So, actually EA has been in ascent. Now the descent is beginning. This of course is one day and corrections could occur especially considering that market volatility moves in cyclical fashion with micro rise and falls. I am simply pointing out a drop which is large enough to be incident oriented.

In February, game sales across the retail spectrum dropped by 27 percent, surely to create slumps across the board. Since this report has released, I am sure this is playing it's role also.

 

Well, based on their earning reports, they are publicly stating something different.

Here is a quote from their second quarter financial results earning report:

"EA is performing well, once again beating street consensus in fiscal Q2," said Chief Executive Officer John Riccitiello. "We delivered yet another quarter of sharp digital growth, with digital revenue up 40% compared to the same period last year, reflecting our strength across multiple brands and channels."
"We delivered a very strong performance in the second quarter, backed by great performances from our EA SPORTS titles," said Chief Financial Officer Blake Jorgensen. "We are forecasting annual non-GAAP EPS growth of at least 25% at the midpoint of our guidance, and Operating Cash Flow of over $400 million."

The report goes on to hype up the successes of it's sports titles.

I too thought that EA was a sinking ship and have seen graph charts highlighting this. Anyhow, their EA investor's site shows something different.

http://investor.ea.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=717276

I am no accountant, but from what I can gather, their net profits far exceed their net losses. . In fiscal year 2012, EA posted GAAP net revenue of $4.1 billion

 

I posted this on another topic i created, but it's also related to this one:

 

Of course they're going to say something different. They still refuse to believe spending 300 million to develop Star Wars: The Old Republic was a terrible idea and they've yet to admit their failure despite making the game free to play just after a year being released. The only reason they see profit with Madden is because they only make minor changes, update the roster, and charge a full $60 because they have a monopoly over American Football games.

I don't believe for a second their net profits exceed their net losses. They may publicly claim that to save face, but I highly doubt it's true.

EDIT: Numbers for The Old Republic vary. I recall hearing they spent $300 million, but it seems it could be anywhere from $150 million to $500 million. That's absurd.

 

Reading through the EA's financial white papers.
Excerpt from EA CEO prepared comments to shareholders:

I would like to point out that all of these digital revenue types have no physical goods costs, and
there is no associated price protection. Eliminating these expenses provides greater savings
resulting in higher margins. Also, consumers tend to purchase digital content over the course of
their gameplay, extending the life of our brands. Lastly, these transactions are direct to
consumers, helping us develop and foster our relationship with our gamers. This digital
momentum continues to build and we see this as the future.

 

Dude, you can "believe whatever you want. I am not posting here to be argumentative. You are preaching to the choir, except that this choir is reading the EA financial white papers which show clear profit gain over loss.

You can't as a corporation make shit up. It's highly illegal. Potential investors must have access to accurate information. It's also mandatory by law that corporations make public their yearly and quarterly earnings. This isn't debatable.

 

I'm not trying to argue with you either. I'm just saying I find it extremely hard to believe EA is receiving a higher net profit and that I don't trust any kind of statistic about EA that comes directly from EA. That's all.

Sorry if I pissed you off, that wasn't my intent.

 

I apologize too, reading back, I came across as a know it all. I don't like EA at all. For my birthday I will have a pinata made out of a EA symbol with a spiked bat to destroy it.

Borrowing from another site: Here is gaming's victory song when EA crumbles to dust, opening the arena for passionate individuals to carry gaming back to it's arcade glory.

 

You were just playing devil's advocate and providing a different prospective on the issue. Nothing wrong with that.

I think a lot of my posts make me look arrogant or angry when most of the time I'm just being sarcastic or blunt. It's not always easy to read the tone of what someone writes on the internet, so that's my fault for not being clear and not wording my posts better.

 

Absolutely agree regarding posts being limited in conveyance. 80% of communication is made through body language, or so I have read somewhere. The idea that words, which are uttered symbols strung together into sentences to create complex visual meaning, are given life through body and more importantly facial gestures acting as physical metaphor leaves writing online one dimensional in scope, forcing us to rely on our own imagination.

Interesting, the first time I met someone from the internet, I assumed that they would be aggressive based on how they came across online, but when I met her, she was extremely almost neurotically shy and stuttered over her words. I was floored. This couldn't be the same person. Out of this, I thought about how I was coloring in who she was based on the amount of information missing through online communication. I actually have a mental image for many of the posters here which is most likely incorrect.

Anyhow, this teaches me to not project intentions of behavior on another poster until it's verified.

 

Just because it is illegal, doesn't mean they aren't doing it. Fraudulent misrepresentation of the "required" nature of the online component for example...

 

Awesome video. Downloaded it in 1080p for "told you so" purpose

 

You know things are bad when LGR pans a SimCity game:



This is the guy with boxed copies of every single Sim* game to date, on nearly every platform it's been released on.

 

Well to be fair, they most likely are managing their books in a way to mischaracterize their earning performance or what is known as cooking the books. This is rampant across the corporate landscape and shouldn't come as a shock.

The issue I made above falls outside of manipulating earnings to reach what are known as earning benchmarks, which influences stock prices, something the CEO is beholden to by shareholders or hiding executive bonuses, which are miniscule tweakings in the overall earning statements. These are where the most rampant manipulation occurs. However, it's absurd to think that a billion dollar company would publish fraudulent profit earnings large enough to cover full blown in the red losses as the federal government taxes profit.

It would be an insane act as the federal government would come to take their share, but oh, the money isn't there. It's too convoluted to even conceive. Corporations of this size are audited yearly because they need to be compliant, as a necessary business practice. If they were to do something so suicidal, the upper management would quickly find itself sitting in a federal prison. You don't hide losses through manipulating earnings at the level of argument which had been generated in this thread.

Based on the arguments in this thread, it would be insane to hide sheer in the red losses by manipulating earnings to show fantastic profit and surplus. This would be akin to a race car driver taking the lug nuts off his wheels and accelerating into a sharp turn at a race track. It's stupid.

Edit: Then it hit me, Enron, worldcom, these creatures had cooked their books not only inflating their earnings but also creating non existent profit and pooled it offshore via tax shelters. So, it is entirely possible that EA could be doing something similar. I do remember reading in one of the EA financial white papers that most of their surplus cash was offshore. This is common as corporations dodge taxes the way witches dodge water. So, yes, it's entirely possible for EA to be propped up on laughing gas.

Edit2: Of course companies that do this are essentially ponzi schemes and destined to crash, though not before the in the know thieves abandon ship to usually end up .....in federal prison. So, yes it's possible EA is hiding in the red losses with profit fueled financial reports, but again, it would in fact be suicidal as it all has to come crashing down sooner or later.