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Posted By Gabriel B. about 7 months ago
EA Writes Off Loss After Thousands of Players Abuse Promotion,
EA just shrugging this off?
Electronic Arts is writing off a loss after a promotion went awry. Last weekend, EA was offering players who finished a survey a $20 voucher that could be used for purchasing games on Origin. The deal seemed straightforward but crafty players soon found out that they could take multiple surveys by registering accounts through EA and Origin, as well as deleting their cookies, which let them retake the survey. News quickly spread and soon thousands of vouchers were being cashed in for games.
Electronic Arts is taking the event in stride. Instead of voiding the vouchers or trying to punish anyone who took advantage of this fault in the survey system, EA has decided to just write off the loss.
So, what are your thoughts? Please share them in the comments below and keep following Blistered Thumbs for all the latest gaming news.
Source: Destructoid
I had gotten this in my e-mail today…
Dear Gamer,
Last week, we sent you an invitation to take a short survey that mentioned we would give you a promo code worth $20 to use on your next purchase once you completed the survey. Unfortunately, due to some misuse of the promo code, we had to discontinue its use early, and you may not have received the discount you were promised.
But you took the time to attempt to take the survey, and we want to say thank you for your time. We’d like to offer you the same $20 discount on your next purchase, through Sunday October 21, 2012. The discount is good for $20 off a purchase of most EA games on Origin priced $19.99 or above.*
To redeem your code, visit Origin.com and simply add an EA game to your shopping cart, proceed to the check-out window, and enter code .
Please note this promotion will only be valid until October 21, 2012, so you will want to act soon.
If you need additional help redeeming your code, you can contact Origin Help for 24/7 assistance.
Sincerely,
The Origin Team
Bravo Origin, bravo.
Lets face it, it would have taken far more money and man power to actually investigate and void every shady voucher. Especially since the storage costs for a downloaded title are minimal. You can’t expect people who were dumb enough to allow such a simple exploit to have a strong way of following up on who “screwed” them. We’d see a far different result if it had been physical copies or it was easier for them to void any illegitimate vouchers. Its still EA, this is only the reaction because the loss was minimal at best.
On one hand, cheap games.
On the other, it requires access to Origin.
I’m not gonna feel sorry for someone who thinks using cookies, to permanently store data, is a good idea. I don’t expect everyone to understand how cookies work, but a gaming company…COME ON. That’s not even basic programming knowledge nowadays. That should be basic knowledge period.
A reasonable thing for EA to do, allow a few free tokens to get away, or mass bannings on origin for exploits. Which sounds worse.
“LOOK AT ALL MY MONEEEEY”
Sounds like they are learning. You can’t punish consumers for your own oversights and mistakes. And they still got valuable data from that survey so it wasn’t a big loss from them.
i disagree..the people who just spammed new accounts/deleted cookies to retake the survey can’t really be counted as “valuable data” since they could of just picked an answer willy-nilly since the only they they want is the $20 voucher.
Unless EA is going to somehow sift through the muck or somehow know which surveys are legit, the entire data pile is suspect.
Either way, nice to see EA taking some kind of responsibility in regards to their screw up. Does this mean they devalued all the IPs on their service?
While EA does plenty of things wrong, good on them for owning up to this systematic mistake. Though they probably figured they’ve had enough bad publicity.