Tuesday 19 March 2013

EA has one rough month!

So it turns out that gaming giant and mega publisher EA is not above having a real bad time every now and then. First of all EA comes under heavy pressure and a great deal of criticism much of it well deserved over the extremely botched launch of their latest SimCity game which left gamer's unable to play SimCity for days on end after huge server instability and failures preventing gamer's from accessing the online only game. This left EA and Maxis in a position in which they had no choice but to issue a public apology and although other areas such as the UK were not affected by this issue as much as the US EA has offered a free game to everyone world wide who registers their copy of SimCity prior to the morning of the 26th of March as part of their apology .​


The list of free games that you can download from their origin service is quite a wide selection to choose from however you do have to download your free game before the 31st of March. The games in that list of freebies include Battlefield 3, Dead Space 3, Mass Effect 3, Medal of Honor: Warfighter, Need for Speed: Most Wanted, Plants vs Zombies, and SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition. Yes Really! in a effort to apologies to customers who can not play the latest SimCity off line they are offering a previous version of Simcity which has a dedicated offline mode in it am i the only one who finds this a bit strange? ​

So that's the first headache for EA but not the last. Following the sham of the SimCity launch John Riccitiello the CEO of EA has announced that he will be stepping down from his position as CEO on March 30th​. John Riccitiello has been quoted as saying. "My decision to leave EA is really all about my accountability for the shortcomings in our financial results this year." EA has decided to post Larry Probst as executive chairman while the company searches for Riccitiello's replacement.​ Probst was CEO of EA from 1991 to 2007 when Riccitiello took over.


So as far as things go a pretty shitty time for EA so far but there is one last kick in the teeth for the company this week. Well the say trouble comes in threes and earlier today it was revealed that a third-party security company called ReVuln was running tests on Origin EAs online game store's software when they discovered that the software had been hacked. A exploit that allows a malicious user to swap links that launch already-downloaded games with those for alternatives. For more info on this exploit click here.

So EA are not having a great time at all at the moment lets hope that there string of misfortune does not continue for much longer for their sake and the sake of the customers on the receiving end of some of these problems.​​

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