Spin 101: Muddy up the legitimate complaints about Origin and the fumbled SimCity launch with anecdotes about conservatives carpetbombing the company with hate

Spin 101: Muddy up the legitimate complaints about Origin and the fumbled SimCity launch with anecdotes about conservatives carpetbombing the company with hate mail regarding LGBTQ playables. Notice that was the last bullet point; you move forward to the next paragraph thinking "wow, that's terrible," and you're shocked enough about that to start forgetting the first bullet points. The next paragraph then doubles down on the LGBTQ hate. You've completely forgotten the SimCity bullet point now. Oh yeah, and without you realizing it, he just lightly compared your complaints about SimCity always-on to gay bashing and not liking the choice of a cover athlete for a sports game. Apparently, EA considers all of them equally frivolous. How 'bout that, huh? This is a pretty good example of how to tell your customers that they're wrong but not leave them feeling like you did so (he did get pretty direct on the DRM point, though, which is interesting). Just look at the love pouring in on the comments over there already, which shows you that it's working in the general case. Not to mention completely omitting what you're going to do about the problems, but cleverly disguising the omission itself. A final thought, all of that aside: If I were Will Wright, I'd be genuinely sad about what happened to SimCity regardless of the circumstances of the Maxis sale. He left EA in 2009, which makes you wonder how long this SimCity has been in development; I'd wager about three years. That's a hallowed franchise in gaming, in my opinion, a unique IP that stood among the ranks of Civilization in its own way for many years and spawned really fun games like SimTower and SimAnt, and after this it will never be the same.