EA Admits Its Own Stupidity, Will Give Away Free Games To People Who Bought ... - The Consumerist

EA Admits Its Own Stupidity, Will Give Away Free Games To People Who Bought ... - The Consumerist

EA is really working to avoid a repeat Worst Company In America win.

After days of being the gaming world’s punching bag for its failure to foresee that it was woefully unprepared for the number of users who would want to begin playing the long-awaited latest edition of SimCity, the folks at EA, the reigning Worst Company In America, are apologizing and admitting they made a stupid mistake.

In a blog post published Friday night, the General Manager for EA’s Maxis brand of games writes that even though the company has added server capacity in response to the high volume of people trying to play the game, “some people are still experiencing response and stability problems that we’re working fast to address.”

She explains that the cause of the problem is a lack of foresight on the company’s part.

“[A] lot more people logged on than we expected,” explains the EA exec. “More people played and played in ways we never saw in the beta.”

“OK, we agree, that was dumb, but we are committed to fixing it,” she continues. “In the last 48 hours we increased server capacity by 120 percent. It’s working â€" the number of people who have gotten in and built cities has improved dramatically. The number of disrupted experiences has dropped by roughly 80 percent.”

EA says there should be further status updates over the weekend.

Meanwhile, since SimCity sold such huge numbers, EA can afford to offer a free PC download game from its catalog to affected customers, who will be notified with details on March 18. Presumably those details will include which games users can choose from, as this info was not mentioned by EA.

“I know that’s a little contrived,” she admits, “kind of like buying a present for a friend after you did something crummy. But we feel bad about what happened. We’re hoping you won’t stay mad and that we’ll be friends again when SimCity is running at 100 percent.”

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Source Article from http://consumerist.com/2013/03/09/ea-admits-its-own-stupidity-will-give-away-free-games-to-people-who-bought-simcity/