The most hated company in the
world according to hardcore gamers.
The company responsible for Farmville, Mafia Wars, Words with
Friends, and a couple dozen knockoffs of more successful games. They make casual games on Facebook and cell phones centered around minimal skill, arbitrary wait times, excessive monetization, a flood of automated referrals spamming everybody's wall with requests to be somebody's neighbor, and their admitted
use of scams and spyware.
Despite their games only being about as much fun as your screensaver at work and taking less effort to make than the average "10,000 Games on 1
CD!" shovelware, they
tapped into the Pavlovian center of grandmothers the
world over to the
tune of billions of dollars in revenue and a nearly 20 billion dollar initial stock offering in 2011. They have since gone on a truly disastrous meltdown, with mass layoffs, executives bailing, their stock plummeting, insider trading and fraud accusations, and Electronic Arts suing them over plagiarism. Time
will tell if they get buried like they deserve.