Electronic Arts COO Peter Moore has responded to a recent poll in which EA was chosen as a semifinalist for “Worst Company in America.” (An "honor" it also received last year .)

”Many continue to claim the Always-On function in SimCity is a DRM scheme. It’s not. People still want to argue about it. We can’t be any clearer – it’s not. Period.”

”Some claim there’s no room for Origin as a competitor to Steam. 45 million registered users are proving that wrong.”

”Some people think that free-to-play games and micro-transactions are a pox on gaming. Tens of millions more are playing and loving those games.”

”We’ve seen mailing lists that direct people to vote for EA because they disagree with the choice of the cover athlete on Madden NFL. Yes, really…”

”In the past year, we have received thousands of emails and postcards protesting against EA for allowing players to create LGBT characters in our games. This week, we’re seeing posts on conservative web sites urging people to protest our LGBT policy by voting EA the Worst Company in America.”

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“ We can do better. We will do better. But I am damn proud of this company.

In a lengthy blog post called “We Can Do Better,” Moore explained that EA has made mistakes but went on to defend the company.“Are we really the ‘Worst Company in America?’” Moore asked. “I’ll be the first to admit that we’ve made plenty of mistakes. These include server shut downs too early, games that didn’t meet expectations, missteps on new pricing models and most recently, severely fumbling the launch of SimCity. We owe gamers better performance than this.”Moore posted the following list responding to recent complaints, commenting that "some of these complaints are 100 percent legitimate" but that "others just don’t hold water."“That last one is particularly telling. If that’s what makes us the worst company, bring it on. Because we're not caving on that,” Moore added.“So here’s my response to this poll: We can do better. We will do better. But I am damn proud of this company, the people around the globe who work at EA, the games we create and the people that play them. The tallest trees catch the most wind. At EA we remain proud and unbowed.”

Andrew Goldfarb is IGN’s news editor. Keep up with pictures of the latest food he’s been eating by following @garfep on Twitter or garfep on IGN.