It must not be nice, receiving an award for being the worst company in America. Getting it twice must sting, well, twice as much. It's not really an award, but it is an indicator of how unhappy people were with EA in the early 2010s, and Mass Effect was a big reason for that.
At least, that's former EA executive Peter Moore's thinking. Moore has served in key gaming positions for years, as the president of Sega of America, the corporate vice president of Microsoft's Interactive Entertainment Business division (Xbox, to us laymen), and he was the COO of EA from 2012 until 2017. During those years, Moore saw the company win its worst company in America awards, and in an interview with The Game Business, he made it clear he's still not happy about those wins.
"At EA we were voted, two years in a row, the worst company in America, because of the end of Mass Effect," Moore said. "This is when BP is polluting the Gulf of Mexico. Bank of America has brought down the global economy with subprime mortgages. But fucking Colonel Shepard dies in Mass Effect 3, and that makes us the worst company in America."
We'll allow Moore's slight misremembering of Shepard's rank, as it has been well over a decade since the character was in a game. "At that point, I jumped on Twitter. I start engaging with gamers and all of the baggage that comes with that. I felt it was the best way to figure out how we could humanize the face of EA. I took that lesson of being the face and the ability to engage with gamers to football. Gamers are volatile, and football fans are volatile. I felt that not being cold and distant, which the football club was with absentee American owners, was the way to go," he continued. "My American owners did not agree. They did not like the fact that I engaged with fans on social media. They felt it was unstatesmanlike."
Moore has often taken things into his own hands. He sees himself as somewhat responsible for starting the console wars, after all, so it's clear he sees himself as a piece of gaming history. Just as Mass Effect 3's ending, and the backlash it received, is remembered as an historic moment.