Yup, my Husband was there and he is disgusted. (Not surprised though)

The conference was a shambles.

I was thinking about this last night for some reason. I get irritated when folks call the employees at EA lazy. I do not know the demographics here but I have worked desk jobs at large corporations for many years and have a pretty good idea how they work. The producers/worker bees there are probably the same as everywhere else. They have to work with and have no control over the budgets, resource/tools, time allotments, productions standards, content of what they do or how they do it. They do what they are told to do and with a smile or they lose their jobs. I am pretty sure they leave home, put in a full workday, and then go home like many of us do, have, or will. They should not be blamed for decisions that are made by upper and middle management.

And as said, no matter what is done, all players will never be happy, but even managing is no easy task. They have to please bosses all the way up to the CEO and they have budgets and deadlines and so on. It is not as easy as some folks would think it all is. Unless you have done it.......maybe a few less stones should be thrown at the workers?

Overall, we have gotten some darn good games and that is why we are here.

edit: other than just having a hatred of EA, for those of you who disagree with me, why do think the employees of EA do not have work performance standards and reviews based on them? Do you think they are keeping their jobs and they sit on a roofdeck all day sunbathing? Are they playing pingpong in a break room all day? Do you think any sensible employer keeps lazy employees who do not meet the requirements in doing what they are told to do? Do you work somewhere where you can be lazy and retain your job unless working for dad, or sleeping with the boss or whatever? Most employees do not. If you are not meeting standards you are out the door and there is a line of people on the sidewalk ready to replace you. And employers know that. And that includes EA.

I blame the management at EA more then the lower people on the totem pole, as they say shit flows downhill. the CEO sets the tone and everyone below has make it happen no matter what or lose there job. I worked at a place like that either you do it or they will find someone else who will. That is the bottom line.

You are totally right! I have worked for a corporation of over 30,000 employees. I have worked when there were backlogs of over 6000 items for months. We worked every day and often stayed late. We worked unpaid mandatory Saturdays up to 5 weeks in a row. Customers were upset and had a right to be. But if someone had called me or my coworkers lazy I would have been furious.

We can be upset with decisions made and so on, but that is a totally different from employees being lazy.

There are things that developers outright reject. Dog houses and TS3 stylize adventure puzzles (Grant said 2hard).

I watched it LIVE on YouTube on the television and it bored me. Not liked I cared in the first place but was interested to see the reaction of the people attending since I don't care for any of EA's current games. The audience definitely wasn't overall hyped throughout and there were quite a bit of awkward silence here and there with the speaker trying too hard to coax applause/appreciation out of people. The lies that came out of the CEO's mouth were horrendous.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekKth75c4bg

As I said this before and got my comment deleted as it was "uncalled for" on the official forums concerning TS4 Seasons/TS4 overall when it comes to transparency.
“Oh, what a tangled web they weave...when first they practice to deceive.” Do people even believe them still when there is so much deception?

Or something like that as I'm not looking at the entirety or what I wrote exactly.

If the truth is uncalled for then what a world we live in.

Maybe this'll be a little controversial, but I honestly question if perhaps EA doesn't have a toxic work environment in general, from the managers to the devs to any type of staffing involved. I mean Drake sure seemed to drum up controversy and has allegedly posted on alt accounts calling this community entitled, and given how long she hung around, I have to question if perhaps others on staff didn't share similar views. You'd think they'd want to get rid of her (sooner? If they did at all) if she expressed views that didn't reflect the staff mentality, no?

And this isn't the Sims staff directly, but there was recently a rather disgusting controversy where two EA/Bioware employees (one former, one current, though the former also seems to currently be with EA elsewhere) decided it was a grand idea to call TotalBiscuit a shitty human being after he lost his battle with cancer, all because they disagreed with him about a video game years ago. That's just....holy shit, those two are fucking bottomfeeders.

My point I suppose is that EA employees do not seem shy to controversy themselves. It's speculation of course and I'm not stating outright the Sims staff may be quite horrible/responsible for issues with the game development itself, but I suppose my point is there's certainly evidence suggesting it's within the realm of possibility and EA may just have an issue with toxic work environments too. (at least in regards to employee sentiment towards consumers) The above post is totally possible too, because I think anyone who's worked an office job knows that sometimes it just takes a bad manager to tank a team effort. Definitely something I've speculated on though before and curious to know how much extends beyond management, though sadly we'll likely never know.

There is no question that top management and all the say down the line have a major effect on the culture and environment in a company and that has a direct effect on the workers. I have worked for the best and the worst and everywhere in between. EA has been around long enough and had enough management changes I am sure the place has changed many times.

The last place I worked a survey was done and the employees rated the company/workplace at 39 out of 100. If you are unlucky enough to work in a place like that, it shows in your work. And very loyal employees start to not give a damn to survive, or they just leave.

I hope EA is not like that, but as said above, we probably never will know. And my guess is that there are some folks there that are not any more thrilled about the switch to mobile than we are.

I couldn’t care less if someone calls me lazy. But working for free? Then I would be spitting fire!!

To say there were a lot of unhappy campers is a major understatement. Hope things are not as bad at EA. Nobody deserves that cr#p. We sure didn't.

Apparently, EA was very heavy on the mobile platform regarding other game titles at this latest E3. Command and conquer or something. I'm sure it's a great idea to try to force people who know what kind of gaming they like to drastically change platform

I expect those that disagree has never worked in that type of environment.

Sincerely,
someone that has.

More so, not only that, but I have never seen anybody from that department apologizing for her unprofessional behavior, like I don't recall a tweet, after she left. That something else that would suggest there is lack of shame with the people that are working along with such a toxic person, or heck they might be the type of people that act just like her.

A company will never do that and legally they probably cannot. I am sure when she left a non-disclosure agreement was signed by both parties. It is bad PR and opens them to a lawsuit possibly to comment about her at all. Especially if she was fired and did not leave on her own accord entirely. Corporate attorneys are very good at writing termination agreements to make sure when the door is shut it stays shut.

When I stopped working it was due to a health issue solely and I had to sign an 8 page agreement.

Unless there was something truly offensive shared from her, that went against the company standards, there is no reason to expect any sort of apology. That would basically ruin her prospects for any future career in the communications field, which is a similarly unprofessional route for a corporation to take.

We don’t know the office politics there, for all we know she could have been very unpopular among the development staff. They can’t openly share that information, and realistically that’s for the best. I don’t agree with her conduct from a professional standpoint, but I can understand it a little. She clearly wasn’t qualified or prepared for the position she sign onto, and ultimately did not have the experience to deal with such a large audience that was overwhelmingly unsatisfied with the game she was managing.

Yeah. Apology wasn't really neccesary and realistically wouldn't happen. I think companies tend to avoid apologies because that itself is admittance they did something wrong. Companies sadly prefer denial.

However, as I said the real question is....she was a community manager and more or less a PR rep. Her job is to represent the company. If the company did not agree with some of her bolder or borderline insulting statements regarding the fans at times, why would they keep her around that long? It might be a different story if she had been a developer; if she's a genius with code but toxic with the community, one could argue the goal should simply be to keep her away from the fans and otherwise keep her employed since she's fantastic at her job description. Instead though, her job directly involved relating to the community and she chose to do so in a condesending, authoratitve manner that at times got mad at us the fans for simply reacting ways she didn't want us to. That itself begs the question if it implies an entitled, superiority complex-esque culture within EA if they felt it ok to keep her staffed despite that.

It is a mystery we will never solve. I am assuming she was a standard employee but may have been a contract one? I think some of the IT people in the company I worked for were under employment contracts for specified terms.

No matter how she went, I am glad she is gone.

She was probably from Accenture. If anyone is guaranteed to please the directors and displease the workers it's an Accenture management expert.

A Estimate from the data analyst Sensor Tower says that Sims Mobile has brought in $15 million in 4 months. That makes it the 8th highest earning mobile game in June. But it sill lags behind Sims Freeplay which is the 3rd highest mobile game for EA. This from Sensor Tower Blog.

Who are these poor saps buying $90 bedroom sets?

Maxie isn't the end all, be all of simming. Look at SimCity...it went off a cliff after SimCity 4, and was replaced by another developers Cities Skylines. I LOVE SC3K and like sc4, but EAMaxis has been supplanted. If EA abandons Sims on PC, perhaps another developer can find a new approach.

It's just a side effect of monetizing the game-service experience, sweetie.

Wait, what the hell? It takes 16 hours to stand behind a yellow line? I'm just reading that wrong, right?

Nope, you read it right. It's like this for Sims Mobile, Freeplay and many other mobile games. I have no idea why it's so popular, you hardly even play the game, it's just a lot of waiting and not much playing. There's the ridiculously priced pay items and on top of that, the events are incredibly difficult to complete without paying your way through the long waiting times, things you need to collect and so on.

It baffles me how these games are so popular. I know it's *in theory* possible to never pay anything but it's very difficult for me to say with a straight face that these games are free.

They're called 'whales' in other games with microtransactions. I do not know where that term came from, so I don't typically use it. My point is that, believe it or not, there are actual people who will spend ridiculously high amounts of money on this kind of content. In fact, they'll spend that money even if what they actually want to get isn't even guaranteed.

I get that some people are all about having a good time now and not caring about anything later (all of these mobile "F2P" games will die, and when they die there will be nothing left of them, nothing to show for all of that money spent), but I just can't imagine willing to be ripped off so badly by a company. Surely they have to know this is a rip-off. (speaking of The Sims, I'm not so sure about that always being the case, but, you know.) It should be even more obvious when gaming companies turn them into RNG and you are gambling. You're spending all of that money gambling for digital content. I get why RNG pulls can get people addicted, I've played these games before, but have not spent the money. That's where I get lost. I understand the joy of hopefully getting that special object, but I'm not going to to throw away hundreds of dollars to get it. It's just absurd. And if you think I'm exaggerating by saying "hundreds of dollars", I'm not. These games not only make people want to gamble, but they charge obscene amounts for it. It's such a scummy business practice and I can not believe anyone is honestly putting up with it. But people are, they actually are.