-al sin
Yesterday, during a conference call with analysts ahead of EA’s quarterly earnings report, CEO John John Riccitiello claimed that recent stories of users violently attacking each other after being subject to his company’s DRM/storefront Origin are completely unfounded.
Following recent well-publicised incidents, the company has been under increasing pressure to do something about its awful customer support and restrictive DRM practices. In the last week alone, two people have attempted arson and a third was arrested for “gross sexual-exposure misdemeanors” following the release of the SimCity beta, and it is hard to forget the spate of riots which erupted over the Mass Effect 3 ending controversy last year. Perhaps most shocking of all was the significant uptick in violent crime reports following E3 2011, at which Origin was first announced.
Riccitiello was cagey on the matter of causation, however, pointing out that no studies have conclusively linked the program with outbreaks of gamer rage, and in fact that services such as The Sims 3 provided a notable placating effect on those who tried them, with users retreating to their rooms for hours at a time, emerging only to go to the toilet and wave their arms at the ceiling while thinking about bread.
“Our company may be restrictive, anti-competitive and without any semblance of morality,” said Riccitiello, “but really I draw the line at being accused of mass-murder-by-proxy. Yes, I will admit, we do have something of an “image problem” – banning users who criticise our business and design practices from playing our games certainly doesn’t help that, and it’s certainly handy that we can blame that on our software being buggy and trigger-happy and…wait, no, uh…”
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