Electronic Arts (EA) Is In A Deep Shit

“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”

Roku Latest Box

Dear all... Do you own a IPTV Streaming box right now? It’s weird but true: of all the countless standalone Internet-TV-streaming boxes which have appeared over the past few years, just two have been unqualified successes. One is Apple TV. The other is Roku, which has thrived by offering a vast selection of stuff, driving prices down as low as $49.99 and otherwise not changing a whole lot. Its sheer simplicity is its strong suit.

But it also presents a challenge. When Roku’s box debuted in 2008, it was called the Netflix player and boasted a single channel of content. Today, it has more than 750 of them, including major movie channels, music, sports, a bevy of specialty stations and 50 games. The interface, however, hasn’t evolved much since it just had a handful of items to choose from. Though still pleasingly straightforward, it’s not scaled to the quantity of offerings at hand.

ROKU

Enter the Roku 3, which is available online now and in stores next month. Replacing the current high-end version, the $99.99 Roku 2 XS, it’s not a radical departure from a hardware standpoint. The case, which is swoopier but about the same size, packs a faster processor and more robust 2×2 dual-band wifi for snappier performance and more glitch-free streaming. The wireless remote control still incorporates motion sensors for use in casual games such as Angry Birds; now it also has a headphone jack, letting you listen to TV in bed without annoying your spouse. (The box comes with earbuds in Roku’s signature purple, but you can also use your own; basically, it turns any headphones into wireless headphones.)

What’s most significant about the new Roku, though, is its new interface — and one of the most significant things about it is that it doesn’t set out to be an interesting new interface. For everything that’s new, which is an awful lot, it still looks like the overarching goal is to fade into the background rather than call attention to itself. (I got a bit of hands-on time with it during a recent briefing by Roku executives.)

Until now, the main Roku interface has featured a row of channels which only let you see five choices at a time. Now, it sports a 3-by-3 grid, which presents nine channels at a time and lets you scroll through additional ones at a much faster clip; it wraps around, so if you sail past your last channels you arrive back at your first ones. The Channel Store looks much the same as the main screen, but with a large spot reserved for promotional space for movies and channels.

Roku’s pan-channel search feature has also been spruced up. When you search for a show or movie, it lists any channels you already have installed first, and then other channels — and you can add a channel without leaving the search results.

The one aspect of the new interface that’s very slightly flashy? The new themes, which skin the interface with custom visuals. There are five of them, such as the cloud-oriented one shown here. And even they aren’t that fancy.

Here’s another plus of Roku’s new look: you don’t need to buy a new Roku to get it. In April, the company will be rolling it out to its other models — the Roku LT, HD, 2 HD and Streaming Stick — all of which remain available.

Roku is the most-watched streaming box in the McCracken household. (Several McCracken households, actually — my non-geek parents and non-geek sister also equipped their homes with boxes, though not at my urging, and seem to be fans.) It’s fun that a small company has figured out a product category that some big companies (coughcoughGoogleTV) have failed to nail. And from what I’ve seen of the Roku 3 and the revised interface, the company has done a good job of continuing the steady-eddie approach to product evolution which has served it well to date.

Here’s Roku’s own video about the new experience: