Yes. Management does not want to admit to THEIR management that they've made any mistakes, and they'll make sure their subordinates don't either. In their statements, EA outright blames the critics for the failure of Medal of Honor: Warfighter, which is a bit extreme, but it's really the same everywhere. When I was an intern at a major corporate software company (in marketing), my supervisor gave me some consumer survey results to tally up and present to the VPs of the branch. When I added it together, I found that the survey procedure was fundamentally broken, but still completely atrocious: everybody who used our product hated it, and were upset with our Tech Support and Salespeople. The only high scores we were getting were from people who didn't understand how the survey worked: people rated us a "10" for certain aspects, and then harshly criticized them because they thought "10" was the lowest score possible.
They went ahead with the positive presentation anyway by scrapping the comments and skewing the data to raise the average scores. Instead of things looking relatively dire, it looked like the branch was doing about an average job. When the accountants finished THEIR part of the quarter, the top execs were likely all pretty surprised, but they responded by driving a shovel through R&D instead of the guys who were actually messing things up - since our surveys were showing that people liked the service we provided, but that some sort of external factor was pushing down the market share. Which of course meant the marketers were more important to nabbing that share back.
The bottom line for anybody in a corporation is making sure they keep their job, so if they've made a mistake, they need to deflect it. If EA's top execs seemed like they were doing poorly, they would be replaced by the board of directors. For this reason, it is in their best interest to make it seem like they are operating at 110% capacity even if some outside influence is messing them up. Damn critics.
Stuff like the Stardock guy admitting he messed up on Elemental is pretty rare, but it's the mark of a healthy corporate atmosphere. My company's employees resorted to more illicit affairs once a new CEO showed up and began talking about outsourcing/downsizing. EA has always had problems like this.
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Topic: Disney buys Lucasfilm (Read 23065 times)