EA Employee Chastises Company Over SimCity in Public Letter - Forbes

The release of SimCity will likely be studied for years as a case of how not to launch a product, and the story keeps getting stranger and stranger. Six hours ago, an anonymous redditor posting under the name “DisappointedEA” made a thread containing an open letter expressing his disappointment in the company’s handling of SimCity. The twist? He reportedly works there.

The poster, claiming to be an artist at EARS, said the only proof he could provide was the fact that all employees received an email from EA Executive Vice President and Chief Talent Officer, Gabrielle Toledano, today about International Women’s Day, which is in fact true. But he’s now deleted the entire text of the post after it received so much attention, which seems like some form of proof in and of itself. I have contacted him to see if he can privately confirm his position at EA, but am still waiting to hear back.

The letter questions EA’s decision to release SimCity with always on DRM, which has ravaged the launch of the game with paying players not being able to log on, or sometimes waiting hours for the privilege. EA has actually resorted to stripping features out of the game in order to help it run better, which has caused some outlets to drastically lower their official review scores. The current buggy, feature-deleted product is not the same game they played for their review, they say.

The alleged employee goes on to say that EA should actually patch the game to allow offline play. He accuses the company of being anti-consumer, shirking accountability and lacking integrity, all things that go against EA’s official list of company values.

Here’s the full text of the letter in question, since nothing ever actually disappears from the internet once it’s made public:

“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”

It’s a bold move for this nameless employee to write something like this, but so bold he might not be nameless for long. The internet loves a good big game hunt, and many are likely hard at work attempting to find out who this person is. The same is probably also true for EA themselves, but their PR nightmare would likely only multiply if they tracked down and fired this person, should he actually work for the company.

And if this is all a big hoax? Overlooking the fact that such a thing would be nearly impossible to prove short of an outright confession, the fact that this letter has gotten so much attention speaks to the true magnitude of this fan uprising. People are always looking for the next reason to pile on EA, but this time, they’ve found one that exposes a real issue in gaming today. People paid for a product they cannot play, due to a measure meant to ward away pirates. In many cases, players also cannot get refunds for their purchase of a non-functional game, which only serves to aggravate the situation further.

As brave as this supposed employee may be, it may come back to bite him, but his Spartacus moment is turning into a rallying cry for the victims of one of the biggest launch disasters in modern gaming history. At this rate, who knows what will happen next?

Update: EA is now gifting a free game to SimCity players for their troubles.

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