@VladVonCastein wrote:
Looking at how quickly EA/Bioware came out and slammed the fake company for the facebook article hoax, I am just wondering if Kotaku's article is incorrect and kotaku's article is way more widely circulated than that hoax, why is EA/Bioware management not saying anything?
Yeah, they probably didn't even want to react to this but this was such a blatant hoax that they had no choice. And even then, they just put a couple of comments on twitter. Nothing here on the forums or the main website.
EAWare just have a tendency to stay silent for months until they are ready. It's typical really for big companies. Their customer focus tends to lie around their production process. Of course they make mistakes there but when it comes to the more regular interactions with customers (call it aftersales or customer service), they have no customer focus at all. They just see it as a cost centre instead of an investment in long term relations.
It just seems to me that they haven't quite understood that they can create much stronger relations with their customers as well as increase the customer base because of word-of-mouth advertisement. It's worth to invest in that but they don't. Only when they're more or less forced to.
Nobody will be surprised when people say that the products you sell by themselves are no longer enough and you need good customer support to distinguish yourself as a company. Now BioWare has had the luxury position of having a bit of a monopoly in what they do. There is no direct competition for Mass Effect or Dragon Age for example because any other Sci-Fi or Fantasy RPG doesn't have what they do with story, companions, romance, etc. They made one MMO and it's the only Star Wars MMO on the market which still has those trade mark elements that BW does.
I mean as much as I hate what they've done to SWTOR in recent years, I don't have an alternative for it.
So, what does this all mean? It means that BioWare can get away with a lot because they do not have to fear people running away to the competition as much and it means that they mostly can choose when to communicate and focus on their needs rather than the customer needs. Because in the end...angry or not, we'll come back to them when the next game or dlc comes out. Of course some will break away and stay away but a lot of people will still end up giving it another go. There still is an appeal in what they offer and nobody else offers this.
I like their games myself but where last year I was increasing spending on BioWare my response to all this has been to stop spending and now find ways of enjoying the BioWare games while spending the bare minimum amount of money on them. I stopped being a fan and became a customer. And this customer will only invest the bare minimum because from my point of view that's what they are investing in their customer relations. So it makes it a more balanced relation.
