It's going to be a while before the dust settles on Monday's executive shakeup at Electronic Arts. And the debate is likely going to last a lot longer than that.
John Riccitiello's departure Monday afternoon from the company he steered for the past six years certainly wasn't filled with warm fuzzies. The press release was filled with boilerplate comments and a lack of any real information or affection. And the slipped-in sentence that the company would report earnings at the low end of guidance - or even possibly below it - certainly didn't add any fondness to the farewell.
Riccitiello's tenure at EA had some highs, but it ultimately will likely be remembered more for the lows when all is said and done. EA has gone head to head with Activision on a few fronts in recent years, and has lost every time in the arena that investors care most about: profits. (We can debate the creative impact of some of those titles all day, but make no mistake, this was a decision that was made entirely on the basis of EA's financial performance.)
It's tough to say exactly where things really started to go wrong for Riccitiello and EA. Some point to The Beatles: Rock Band – which was widely expected to be a monster hit, but fell short of expectations. Others note the gamble on a rebooted Medal of Honor series, which both failed to find an audience or impress critics.
Still others points at last year's Star Wars: The Old Republic, reportedly the most expensive video game ever created, which fell flat soon after its launch and forced EA to transition it to a free-to-play model – an embarrassing move for a title that management spent years promoting as a World of Warcraft killer.
Ultimately, though, Riccitiello's downfall probably had little to do with any one of the company's games. It was more about his slowness in reacting to change.
EA has been the flag bearer for big console games and ignored the digital space for far too long. By failing to see that sea change coming, Riccitiello probably sealed his fate long ago.
All of that said, you can't talk about John Riccitiello without also noting some of his victories at the company. His recruitment of Vince Zampella and Jason West was the stuff of industry legend, no matter how messy it got. He brought Bioware into the fold, which gave EA new franchises such as Mass Effect and Dragon Age. He's genuinely liked by many of the company's employees. And he started off his run at the company with a philosophy that many of today's developers long for – let the company's various labels operate more autonomously.
He also oversaw the 2008 bid for Take-Two Interactive – one that ultimately fell short, but that (had he been able to pull it off) would have been a big boost to the company's bottom line. In 20/20 hindsight, one wonders if that was a turning point for the company's current financial state.
Riccitiello's failure to pull EA out of its slump is particularly painful for the man who's taking over for him temporarily. Larry Probst handpicked Riccitiello to run the company when he stepped down from the CEO slot in 2007.
Now Probst (who had stayed on as chairman of the board) is in that CEO role once again – and while he's likely only there for a temporary period this time, he's taking the reigns at a turbulent time. The SimCity debacle is generating bad PR, though investors haven't seemed to mind the problems so far. The earnings for the current quarter are looking grim. And we're going into a console transition at a particularly rocky time for the industry.
Riccitiello may not have been the person to move the company to the next level, but whoever ultimately fills that role is going to have a very hard job ahead of them.
SimCity was the last chance to survive the earnings shortfall. However releasing it late would have got him just as sacked as releasing it on time but broken has. The game was already over. Late but working would have been the better short term choice for EA if not for Riccitiello.
My personal opinion is the disastrous launch is better for EAs long term IFF it causes them to pull back from anti-customer policies. Don't see that happening.
It is a shame that he will be remembered for how EA was handled the last couple years. He made a huge attempt to reorganize the company from day one into a place that will pump out a lot of original and quality titles. Games like Dead Space, Mirror's Edge, Burnout Paradise and more was refreshing to see from the publisher that innovated the yearly release with their sports catalog.
I wouldn't say that the market was not on board with those games. What happened was that the market didn't jump on board to the AAA blockbuster levels that a publisher like EA expects of its games. Had EA had different expectations for those games, then they would have seen quite clearly that those games would have met them.
No mention of the repeated cancellations of EA's NBA titles, thus effectively giving the market for NBA games over to a competitor? Dropping a year didn't kill Madden in the 90s, but they made sure it didn't happen again. The extra profit from sports titles could have been used to shore up other titles or invest in other things that might break out.
Disclaimer: I was hired by Pandemic Studios in 1998. EA acquired Pandemic in 2008. I left Pandemic (& EA) in Nov 2009, voluntarily.
He definitely was fired. And if you look at EA's results, its not just SimCity, its just that EA hasn't been able to execute for the past 4 years. Which is surprising since he was a good COO. I guess the guy had the luck to become CEO just in time for an economic depression.
What blows my mind is how many gamers actually seem happy about this. I certainly am not. EA's such a part of the industry it will cause pain for it which will ripple throughout the industry.
I wonder what EA's PR could have done under this man's watch that has gamers euphoric for his demise? I mean really what could it be? I personally don't hate EA, but I'm not blind to thier grand mistakes, much of which are listed in this article.
Gamers seem to forget that we're all on the same team. Somehow, somewhere along the line it became us vs. them and people love to celebrate the struggle of giants like EA/THQ/Activision, even though those struggles mean thousands of developers lose their jobs.
The general masses are quite misinformed about EA as well. Most of the people I've talked to still think EA is 100% to blame for the ME3 ending.
Why does it blow your mind that gamers, treated badly for years with crappy DRMs and EAs incapability to execute any halfway succesful launch correctly, are happy to see one of those go who had a saying over this course?
Sure it was not him alone. But cleaning of such things has to start somewhere and cutting off the head often yields a deep enough shakeup to get rid of additional entities related to the problem.
In all fairness: After the fiasco around the BF3 launch, the exact same fiasco with Sim City (oh see we had success, too bad that our servers are not capable to handle more than 10% of the load which we unluckily built on a totally unscalable platform we should never have accepted post alpha), the Massive Effect 3 launch fiasco where extra content was launched along the game (clearly not a artist time filler during the final phase but active development effort) and their as well as Ubisofts continued push towards always on DRM, when they are clearly not interested in using it for the player, only against them (a day night difference to Blizzards SC2 DRM which is a feature, not just a troublemaker for paying morrons) I as gamer and indie developer can not say that I regret to finally see heads rolling.
These big publishers did very bad and game economy destroying decisions for their top 5 brands for many years now in an attempt to maximize their profits at the cost of the gamers experience he paid for.
It was clear that this would not work forever (nobody is stupid enough to pay more and more money while being treated worse and worse for doing so) and I'm happy that Android and iOS as well as F2P accelerated the punishment spiral for this missbehaviours the way they did actually while offering alternatives, otherwise the rotten system forced upon gamers through the likes as EA would have caused another gaming apocalypse like the one in the 80s
I'm honestly a little embarrassed at the maturity level of the coverage Riccitiello's exit from EA has been receiving, this site and its commenters being a pleasant exception. Game journalistic outlets post up the most unflattering picture they can find of him, while snarky comments from both sides of the fence are endless. It's human nature to want to burn effigies and attribute large-sweeping failures to a recognizable face, but why would any real fan celebrate the failings of such a large game company as a whole?
EA is a company that's drawn a lot of deserved hatred, but pinning this kind of vitriol on Riccitiello is a really immature move that these so-called fans need to stop indulging in.
"why would any real fan celebrate the failings of such a large game company"
Please try to remember fans are fans of the GAMES not the publishers. It's something publishers seem to constantly forget. Forget when pushing out unfinished games. Forget when imposing overzealous DRM. Forget when rentalising already overpriced software.
I read the Forbes article and I agree with what you said. I'm talking specifically about mainstream gaming news outlets and all of their paid, professional writers engaging in this kind of baffling reverie towards bad news in an industry they claim to be experts on.
@ Paul
That's very true, but I was referring to fans as in "fans of games" and not "fans of EA" (the latter is a rare breed that cautiously forages in forest clearings at night and steals away into the darkness before the dawn, that is to say, I've never seen or met one).
Optimistically, gaming fans are a very ardent community with very strong, passionate opinions. Pessimistically, I think it points to the collective immaturity of the audience and an inability to see the bigger picture at hand, and as a member of that audience, I find it a little disappointing.
"EA has been the flag bearer for big console games and ignored the digital space for far too long. By failing to see that sea change coming, Riccitiello probably sealed his fate long ago."
Activision seems to be doing ok with big console games. If anything, EA has been throwing good money after bad on new fads. They havent been slow to change, they've been too fast.
Exactly, the author has a very strange interpretation. Both Riccitiello's '97-04 and '07-13 stints have been marked by frantic attempts to diversify into digital distribution. This is the guy that bought Pogo, Playfish, Popcap and Firemint. They tried to go head to head with Steam (5 years too late to make an impact, admittedly). They dove straight into Facebook games without stopping to sniff.
Like you said, they've been souring titles trying to shoehorn alternative business models into them. Kotick's Activision seems downright traditional in comparison.
I've been posting suggestions that this was inevitable here for close to a year. EA leaders certainly had identified that the online space was a critical frontier that they needed to move into, and seemed desperate to do so. It certainly was not for trying, they threw an unbelievable amount of money at moving into online gaming. This was, actually, the problem. This money was not spent intelligently, and thus was mostly wasted. This was squarely the responsibility of management, as from what I can see all the related development studios did exactly what they were told to do, unfortunately.
Adapting to change does not mean moving 55% (arbitrary number) of your budget from column "A" to column "B". Without the proper labor infrastructure and domain expertise, that is just throwing money away, which is what occurred here. Buying large Facebook developers in bids that appeared at best desperate only underlined EA management's lack of understanding of the new business environment.
Having attempted to advise EA during this time (unsuccessfully), and having had a very different experience when I advised several of EA's competitors (successfully), I can only think that any empire can come to an end in the blink of an eye due to one weak leader. It must be a tremendous responsibility.
EA should die in great pain, such big Moloch couldnt be good for games.. if you want inovation you have now Kickstarter, which is also problematic, but still better than publishers crapp.
what a nice informed and well explained opinion you have...
please understand that Publishers are needed, and a vital part of this market, atleast foor AAA games.
it seems Riccitiello has done quite a lot that has worked out, he has brought Fifa back to the main stage, gotten Battlefield to be a real competitor for COD, created quite a lot of new franchises. and the digital platform origin although at first met with great friction, has been gaining ground.
offcourse this is hardly only the CEO's doing, but still he manifested the oppertunity. and I hate to see him go down in teh history books only for the things that went wrong.
I do hope that EA will however decide to bring back some games fromt he history of the company,
ie Dungeon keeper theme hospital etc these games have great potential and would diversify the companies offerings greatly. (next to sports shooters and racing games)
While I am in agreement that EA's business structure as it is now needs to die, I don't believe that the entire company needs to be unemployed. There are some pleasantly talented people there, who clearly had no input on the business decisions that led to this awful reputation it has today.
Firing this man won't change the fact that massive budgets and massive marketing isn't making every game a massive hit. He might not have been the one to lead them into the future, but it's still corporate bloat that's weighing down the ship.
Honestly, I don't. As far as DRM goes even if it wasn't in their hands doesn't matter. If you have a problem with it don't buy the game, if you don't then get it. For me that a separate issue (I'm not for it so I'm not buying it). However, there are some issues that on a very fundamental level should have been worked out prior to release. Namely, AI and path finding, which are terrible, and I do mean terrible, in the new Sim City. To me that is the most inexcusable part of the whole debacle. If your simulations are faulty and your making a simulation game, then you have made a bad game. Doesn't matter how many new features, bells, whistles, or pretty graphics you add on, your game core mechanic is flawed.
There are also some major bugs in the online mode (sharing resources with other players mostly) that would have been caught if even a moderate amount of QA was performed.
Probst was either smart, or lucky, to 'hand over' reigns to Riccitiello just in time for the Global Financial Crisis to hit. Most of the big publishers have had a hard time since then. And now that the economy is recovering, Probst takes the reigns back again... hmmm... what a coincidence. "Fall Guy" anyone?
In any case, EA have been undermining the games industry for a while with their business practices. Check out this CleverNoob video ("Is the Gaming Industry Crashing?") for more details: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZxXEidtxHk
I predicted EA's downfall 4 years from now. With Riccitiello leaving the company will either go into a new direction(away from micro transactions, $10 fee on used games), or a death spiral of continued mistakes with their customers. It'll all come down to who takes over. I hope for a better EA.
I dunno about that Take Two acquisition - if buying out your competition is the only way your company can grow, then I think you have problems as a company.
Indeed, you could argue that's been EA's problem for a long time. They buy companies, then dissolve them after only realizing minimum short term gains.
About the only real exception has been Maxis, and you wonder how that would have been if The Sims hadn't been such a surprise hit. Bioware looks like it could be headed down the same old EA road.
The untold part of this story is why Larry Probst had such faith in Riccitiello for so long. That's not something I know, but I do know a lot of the background.
Originally, Riccitiello came on as EA's COO and built a huge team that put together "EA.com" which was EA's response to the world of the internet (this is in the late 1990s); it was so big it was going to have its own tracking stock and be spun off as a seperate company. At the time, the "common wisdom" was that brick & mortar would be gone in a couple of years, (literally - a couple of years, not a decade) and the entire world would be online - Pets.com was a big example of the "new world" that would wipe out EA's existing business. While Riccitiello built that, Don Mattrick was in charge of the existing business and ran the studio system, which at that time was mostly console & PC titles, with most of the money coming from console.
EA.com was a huge disaster - the loss was over $500 million dollars. And yet EA did so well at the time, with the studio under Mattrick, that this loss was able to be completely ignored and was not mentioned to Wall Street! In the industry, it was a big "open secret" for years. Incidentally, several of the people who were key lieutenants to Riccitiello at the time ended up taking the fall for the failure of the project.
However, it was obvious that the entire project had no clear direction and was staffed mostly with people who had not built any sort of interactive product before, let alone a game. Which was not a surprise - when Riccitiello came on board EA, he was mostly computer illiterate. His background was in consumer packaged goods (Pepsi, sporting goods) and he was an average late 90's computer user - he knew how to use email and Microsoft Word. He didn't know anything about software development and especially games (which was painfully obvious from the questions he asked about projects in progress). This was a huge elephant in the room, especially at company meetings, when he would make what he thought was an massive, insightful observation about the business...and be greeted with silence by the entire company.
A major part of the EA.com strategy was to acquire online companies and attempt to fold them into the overall online strategy. And there were always many, many different types of projects going on all at once, in multiple directions.
Eventually Riccitiello was let go and EA continued onward during the Playstation 2 era, where it dominated. But, this is the interesting part, Probst brought Riccitiello back and eventually let Mattrick go to Microsoft. When Riccitiello returned, he was able to spin what EA was doing in digital as a continuation of what he had started with EA.com. This is the era that most of the current coverage is focused on, the huge spending on acquisitions - which was part of the strategy he'd used at EA.com.
I think that Probst at one point thought he saw a worthwhile successor in Riccitiello, which is why he originally brought him onboard and gave him such authority. Yet even with the big failure of EA.com, Probst still believed Riccitiello was the man for the job, and that some time working with a development company would give him additional experience, and later brought him back - and stood by him for years while the company lost value. This is not an exception, it's a part of the EA culture - there are some execs who have stayed for years and years.
I don't think Probst is going to do this, but I think he should see if he can get back Mattrick.
I dunno where you all get your info but EA is well positionned for next-gen AND digital. JR stepped down because he couldn't hit expectations and that's all. This guy did a lot for EA and if it wasn't for him, EA would have died a slow death long ago. You can't expect the guy to make everything right, all in all he did a great job though.
Where did you get the information that they are well positioned for digital?
Origin is doing badly, selling overpriced stuff at prices higher than the physical distribution.
EA lately decided to further raise their profits and ripp off their customers by adding microtransaction in all future titles instead of finishing their games properly so they scale to enable everyone to enjoy the game they pay a small fortune for and people simply will no longer support that path thanks to mobile, indie and f2p games aside of 1 or 2 game buys a year if at all.
So basically they are doing their very best to ignore reality and come up with own unrealistic models of financing to cover up for their missmanagement and the resulting lose of money
"EA... ignored the digital space for far too long"
LOL. I'm not sure whether such an observation could be more incorrect. As much as you may dislike them, EA has been a pioneer (via acquisition or internal studio) in more corners of the "digital" market than any other publisher. To cite a few initiatives:
Ultima Online (1997) - first major MMOG commercial success, paved the way for EQ, WoW etc. Still operating 16 years on!
Pogo (acquired in 2001) - Did much to establish the bored housewive casual games market, proved that social interaction and gaming for this demographic are key usage drivers, was amongst the first to try microtransactions with this demographic (in 2006), all achieved years before Zynga and Facebook gaming
EA Mobile (founded in 2004 and expanded with Jamdat (06) and Chillingo (10) acquisitions) - amongst the first dedicated mobile games publishers, has been one of the market leaders (by overall revenue) since then
Playfish (acquired 2009) - bought when it was the 2nd biggest Facebook games company
Not to mention countless other early digital initiatives such as Majestic (2001 ARG), Battlefield Heroes (F2P shooter, 2008), Battleforge (F2P CCG, 2009) etc...
Ignoring the digital space is absolutely not a valid criticism. EA's problem is that it was arguably too eager to get into the digital space and too early, often backing and paying over the odds for initial market leaders whose success quikly disipated under EA's guidance.
Agreed, it's a great balanced article overall but that one sentence completely misses the mark. EA's digital business is 1.5bn$, that's slightly more than Zynga and close to Mobage & GREE. They also have 4 titles in the top 30 grossing on iOS (more than any other publisher), and a few more below that.
EA chose to invest very heavily on digital, and some investments are paying off while other massive ones completely backfired (Warhammer, SWTOR, Origin perhaps...).
Why am I glad to see him leave? Oh, let me count the ways...
- CoD-ifying Dead Space to cater to the "dude brah" crowd, which also created the paradox of a horror game that was no longer scary in any depth of interpretation
- Origin. 'nuff said.
- How quickly they retconned like hell because Mirror's Edge wasn't some ginormous success. Oh, sure, it was a helluva(n) experiment, and while I didn't get into it as a player, I did find it impressive that they did take the time to try it out... after all, that's what the nature of experiments ARE.
- While I couldn't have cared less at the time for the NBA Live fiasco, because I was happy as hell that NBA Jam was being brought back to fill the void, the fact we only got like two games out of it with literally no difference despite the highly publicized hiring jam they did to prep for a new NBA IP is rather embarrassing.
- The fact that "not banning" someone for being critical of their business practices is actually news worthy says all that needs to be said about the stained reputation this company has.
- Speaking of, said business practices now have become the stuff of internet memes, and not in any enlightening or good way.
- Killing off what WAS a good thing with the EA MMA title by kow-towing it to the licensed franchises rather than sticking it to 'da man' (in that case, UFC)
- The utter betrayal to what could have easily been a turn-key franchise for EA in the form of Def Jam: ICON
- Killing off Westwood studios, enabling EA to create such a debacle that was C&C 3, to assure that the same franchise that got me IN TO RTS's, is the same franchise that killed my interest in the entire genre
- It's no secret that the only measurable growth the company has seen in the last four or more years has been to basically acquire studios for the name recognition, fire everyone and then curb-stomp the studio out of existence.
- Turning Mass Effect from the engrossing and masterfully immersive action RPG into another "dude brah" game with multiplayer. I refuse to touch Mass Effect 3 on the grounds of I don't want my impression of the series soured by that bastard child of a title, and because of the Origin requirement.
- Basically enabling Crytek to behave like the entitled twits they are and fueling the "PC master race" fanboys so that they can try to be another id, without the years of contributions to the industry at large to back up their aspirations to be a tech demo company. I want to hurl every time I have to deal with someone who spouts off a Crytek game as the "be all, end all" for why PC gaming is superior, but then refuses to see the irony that its bloated nature assures that all but the 1% will ever be able to afford a system that could run it as pretty and fluidly to justify such claims. And just the fact that Crytek continues to very publicly piss and moan whenever they have to optimize ANYTHING is enough to make me wish they got the corporate lashings they deserve, yet THIS is the company EA chooses to let run free. :|
- I was one who wished Bioware just stuck with making a proper KotOR 3. Making it an MMO was a blatant attempt at a cash-grab, true... and at least SW:TOR as a game initially addressed many of the things that bothered me with the genre. Then when F2P was finally introduced, the draconian limitations for free-to-play effectively bastardized every single aspect that was good about the game.
The sad thing is, I could probably go on and on, but I'd sooner hit a character limit before fully expounding upon EA's many failures under this... guy's... tenure. The problem with people like this is that when their executive decisions flounder, they then fire the programmers, artists and simply shut down studios that didn't deserve it. It's about time these executives were forced to face direct consequences for their actions. For his crimes against the game dev community and the gaming community at large, I hope he's earned a lifetime ban from the industry.
Here are some issues that can be laid at Riccitiello's feet: EA employment practices wrt coder tx are not respected. EA game design documents revolve primarily around monetization & maximization of sales. More money is spent at ea on marketing than game development. Riccitiello had poor instincts wrt to gamer players. EA PR is a mess. And finally, EA has a reputation of destroying the internal dynamics of acquired developers.
This has all lead to creatively bankrupt game development and an adversarial relationship with end consumers, which hurts the bottom line.
Simcity was emblematic of EA under Riccitiello and a fitting capstone to his tenure wrt studio management, game development, and customer relations.
On balance, I'm glad to see him go. On the one hand, he did do some good by emphasizing fewer higher quality games over many low quality games. But on the other hand, he led the charge to screw over the customers in every way he could with regard to consumer rights and with a myopic obsession with online/social and scorched earth DRM practices. And those are things that I am 100% unwilling to forgive or forget. No matter how pretty the shiny inside, encasing the shiny in a layer of shite is just a stupid idea.
Even with him gone, I honestly doubt it'll change EA's culture of customer abusive DRM/mandatory online everything in a way that'll positively benefit them in the long run. They still have people like Frank Gibeau on board who could not be more disconnected from the customer base (and reality too, it seems, based on past statements to the press).
The fact is that EA has a massive and growing problem with their customers. And if shareholders don't understand that the long term prospect for a company that is loathed by its paying customers is not good, then I'm going to be happy to see those shareholders lose their money as EA continues to struggle going forward.
EA needs to start respecting and valuing their customers again. And not just with platitudes. Things like:
Make any social/online aspects of 'single player' games, if they must be included at all, 100% optional.
Either stop forcing the Origin client onto customers who want the games but are unwilling to deal with the client, or change the client functionality, EULA, and TOS to:
1. Allow players to limit what types of information the client can send EA
2. Ensure that the players have an enduring right to play what they have paid for regardless of changes to future TOS/EULA's
3. Stop trying to take away consumer rights like resale or class action suits if you lie or do something illegal. Just stop it. No really, STOP IT or die a corporate death and do everyone a favor.
And NO MORE DRM shenanigans.
Shareholders? Are you listening? Ok...DRM harms the paying customers and pisses them off. Pissed off customers start looking for alternatives to your DRM'd product. In the long run, DRM turns paying customers into the very pirates you are concerned about. The piratical asshats remove the DRM anyway so DRM does NOT impact pirates except for giving them a puzzle to solve and the incentive to be the first to release a crack and enhance their reputation. If you want a company to make money, stop fretting about the asshats who will never buy your company's products and start worrying about pissing off the people who are the source of your company's revenue. And as a bonus, you get to stop paying for the DRM technology/product that turns your customers into pirates so publishing costs are lower.
If EA did this, and committed to it, I'd be willing to forgive and forget. But I doubt that EA and their shareholders will wake up. The only EA game that I'm remotely interested in right now is DA3 and, even then, DA2 nearly turned me off the franchise completely. There's zero chance of me buying it if it comes encumbered with all this online/DRM/Origin shite. And if so, then I am completely done with EA products. Which is a shame as EA have put out some great games in the past. But perhaps my gaming future belongs to more customer friendly developers/publishers like CD Project and Kickstarted projects.
My personal opinion is the disastrous launch is better for EAs long term IFF it causes them to pull back from anti-customer policies. Don't see that happening.
Too bad that the market didn't jump on board.
Disclaimer: I was hired by Pandemic Studios in 1998. EA acquired Pandemic in 2008. I left Pandemic (& EA) in Nov 2009, voluntarily.
What blows my mind is how many gamers actually seem happy about this. I certainly am not. EA's such a part of the industry it will cause pain for it which will ripple throughout the industry.
The general masses are quite misinformed about EA as well. Most of the people I've talked to still think EA is 100% to blame for the ME3 ending.
Sure it was not him alone. But cleaning of such things has to start somewhere and cutting off the head often yields a deep enough shakeup to get rid of additional entities related to the problem.
In all fairness: After the fiasco around the BF3 launch, the exact same fiasco with Sim City (oh see we had success, too bad that our servers are not capable to handle more than 10% of the load which we unluckily built on a totally unscalable platform we should never have accepted post alpha), the Massive Effect 3 launch fiasco where extra content was launched along the game (clearly not a artist time filler during the final phase but active development effort) and their as well as Ubisofts continued push towards always on DRM, when they are clearly not interested in using it for the player, only against them (a day night difference to Blizzards SC2 DRM which is a feature, not just a troublemaker for paying morrons) I as gamer and indie developer can not say that I regret to finally see heads rolling.
These big publishers did very bad and game economy destroying decisions for their top 5 brands for many years now in an attempt to maximize their profits at the cost of the gamers experience he paid for.
It was clear that this would not work forever (nobody is stupid enough to pay more and more money while being treated worse and worse for doing so) and I'm happy that Android and iOS as well as F2P accelerated the punishment spiral for this missbehaviours the way they did actually while offering alternatives, otherwise the rotten system forced upon gamers through the likes as EA would have caused another gaming apocalypse like the one in the 80s
EA is a company that's drawn a lot of deserved hatred, but pinning this kind of vitriol on Riccitiello is a really immature move that these so-called fans need to stop indulging in.
Please try to remember fans are fans of the GAMES not the publishers. It's something publishers seem to constantly forget. Forget when pushing out unfinished games. Forget when imposing overzealous DRM. Forget when rentalising already overpriced software.
I read the Forbes article and I agree with what you said. I'm talking specifically about mainstream gaming news outlets and all of their paid, professional writers engaging in this kind of baffling reverie towards bad news in an industry they claim to be experts on.
@ Paul
That's very true, but I was referring to fans as in "fans of games" and not "fans of EA" (the latter is a rare breed that cautiously forages in forest clearings at night and steals away into the darkness before the dawn, that is to say, I've never seen or met one).
Optimistically, gaming fans are a very ardent community with very strong, passionate opinions. Pessimistically, I think it points to the collective immaturity of the audience and an inability to see the bigger picture at hand, and as a member of that audience, I find it a little disappointing.
Activision seems to be doing ok with big console games. If anything, EA has been throwing good money after bad on new fads. They havent been slow to change, they've been too fast.
Like you said, they've been souring titles trying to shoehorn alternative business models into them. Kotick's Activision seems downright traditional in comparison.
Adapting to change does not mean moving 55% (arbitrary number) of your budget from column "A" to column "B". Without the proper labor infrastructure and domain expertise, that is just throwing money away, which is what occurred here. Buying large Facebook developers in bids that appeared at best desperate only underlined EA management's lack of understanding of the new business environment.
Having attempted to advise EA during this time (unsuccessfully), and having had a very different experience when I advised several of EA's competitors (successfully), I can only think that any empire can come to an end in the blink of an eye due to one weak leader. It must be a tremendous responsibility.
please understand that Publishers are needed, and a vital part of this market, atleast foor AAA games.
it seems Riccitiello has done quite a lot that has worked out, he has brought Fifa back to the main stage, gotten Battlefield to be a real competitor for COD, created quite a lot of new franchises. and the digital platform origin although at first met with great friction, has been gaining ground.
offcourse this is hardly only the CEO's doing, but still he manifested the oppertunity. and I hate to see him go down in teh history books only for the things that went wrong.
I do hope that EA will however decide to bring back some games fromt he history of the company,
ie Dungeon keeper theme hospital etc these games have great potential and would diversify the companies offerings greatly. (next to sports shooters and racing games)
Oh! JR? Yeah, it's about the whole market which is out of his hands.
There are also some major bugs in the online mode (sharing resources with other players mostly) that would have been caught if even a moderate amount of QA was performed.
In any case, EA have been undermining the games industry for a while with their business practices. Check out this CleverNoob video ("Is the Gaming Industry Crashing?") for more details: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZxXEidtxHk
Indeed, you could argue that's been EA's problem for a long time. They buy companies, then dissolve them after only realizing minimum short term gains.
About the only real exception has been Maxis, and you wonder how that would have been if The Sims hadn't been such a surprise hit. Bioware looks like it could be headed down the same old EA road.
Originally, Riccitiello came on as EA's COO and built a huge team that put together "EA.com" which was EA's response to the world of the internet (this is in the late 1990s); it was so big it was going to have its own tracking stock and be spun off as a seperate company. At the time, the "common wisdom" was that brick & mortar would be gone in a couple of years, (literally - a couple of years, not a decade) and the entire world would be online - Pets.com was a big example of the "new world" that would wipe out EA's existing business. While Riccitiello built that, Don Mattrick was in charge of the existing business and ran the studio system, which at that time was mostly console & PC titles, with most of the money coming from console.
EA.com was a huge disaster - the loss was over $500 million dollars. And yet EA did so well at the time, with the studio under Mattrick, that this loss was able to be completely ignored and was not mentioned to Wall Street! In the industry, it was a big "open secret" for years. Incidentally, several of the people who were key lieutenants to Riccitiello at the time ended up taking the fall for the failure of the project.
However, it was obvious that the entire project had no clear direction and was staffed mostly with people who had not built any sort of interactive product before, let alone a game. Which was not a surprise - when Riccitiello came on board EA, he was mostly computer illiterate. His background was in consumer packaged goods (Pepsi, sporting goods) and he was an average late 90's computer user - he knew how to use email and Microsoft Word. He didn't know anything about software development and especially games (which was painfully obvious from the questions he asked about projects in progress). This was a huge elephant in the room, especially at company meetings, when he would make what he thought was an massive, insightful observation about the business...and be greeted with silence by the entire company.
A major part of the EA.com strategy was to acquire online companies and attempt to fold them into the overall online strategy. And there were always many, many different types of projects going on all at once, in multiple directions.
Eventually Riccitiello was let go and EA continued onward during the Playstation 2 era, where it dominated. But, this is the interesting part, Probst brought Riccitiello back and eventually let Mattrick go to Microsoft. When Riccitiello returned, he was able to spin what EA was doing in digital as a continuation of what he had started with EA.com. This is the era that most of the current coverage is focused on, the huge spending on acquisitions - which was part of the strategy he'd used at EA.com.
I think that Probst at one point thought he saw a worthwhile successor in Riccitiello, which is why he originally brought him onboard and gave him such authority. Yet even with the big failure of EA.com, Probst still believed Riccitiello was the man for the job, and that some time working with a development company would give him additional experience, and later brought him back - and stood by him for years while the company lost value. This is not an exception, it's a part of the EA culture - there are some execs who have stayed for years and years.
I don't think Probst is going to do this, but I think he should see if he can get back Mattrick.
Origin is doing badly, selling overpriced stuff at prices higher than the physical distribution.
EA lately decided to further raise their profits and ripp off their customers by adding microtransaction in all future titles instead of finishing their games properly so they scale to enable everyone to enjoy the game they pay a small fortune for and people simply will no longer support that path thanks to mobile, indie and f2p games aside of 1 or 2 game buys a year if at all.
So basically they are doing their very best to ignore reality and come up with own unrealistic models of financing to cover up for their missmanagement and the resulting lose of money
LOL. I'm not sure whether such an observation could be more incorrect. As much as you may dislike them, EA has been a pioneer (via acquisition or internal studio) in more corners of the "digital" market than any other publisher. To cite a few initiatives:
Ultima Online (1997) - first major MMOG commercial success, paved the way for EQ, WoW etc. Still operating 16 years on!
Pogo (acquired in 2001) - Did much to establish the bored housewive casual games market, proved that social interaction and gaming for this demographic are key usage drivers, was amongst the first to try microtransactions with this demographic (in 2006), all achieved years before Zynga and Facebook gaming
EA Mobile (founded in 2004 and expanded with Jamdat (06) and Chillingo (10) acquisitions) - amongst the first dedicated mobile games publishers, has been one of the market leaders (by overall revenue) since then
Playfish (acquired 2009) - bought when it was the 2nd biggest Facebook games company
Not to mention countless other early digital initiatives such as Majestic (2001 ARG), Battlefield Heroes (F2P shooter, 2008), Battleforge (F2P CCG, 2009) etc...
Ignoring the digital space is absolutely not a valid criticism. EA's problem is that it was arguably too eager to get into the digital space and too early, often backing and paying over the odds for initial market leaders whose success quikly disipated under EA's guidance.
EA chose to invest very heavily on digital, and some investments are paying off while other massive ones completely backfired (Warhammer, SWTOR, Origin perhaps...).
- CoD-ifying Dead Space to cater to the "dude brah" crowd, which also created the paradox of a horror game that was no longer scary in any depth of interpretation
- Origin. 'nuff said.
- How quickly they retconned like hell because Mirror's Edge wasn't some ginormous success. Oh, sure, it was a helluva(n) experiment, and while I didn't get into it as a player, I did find it impressive that they did take the time to try it out... after all, that's what the nature of experiments ARE.
- While I couldn't have cared less at the time for the NBA Live fiasco, because I was happy as hell that NBA Jam was being brought back to fill the void, the fact we only got like two games out of it with literally no difference despite the highly publicized hiring jam they did to prep for a new NBA IP is rather embarrassing.
- The fact that "not banning" someone for being critical of their business practices is actually news worthy says all that needs to be said about the stained reputation this company has.
- Speaking of, said business practices now have become the stuff of internet memes, and not in any enlightening or good way.
- Killing off what WAS a good thing with the EA MMA title by kow-towing it to the licensed franchises rather than sticking it to 'da man' (in that case, UFC)
- The utter betrayal to what could have easily been a turn-key franchise for EA in the form of Def Jam: ICON
- Killing off Westwood studios, enabling EA to create such a debacle that was C&C 3, to assure that the same franchise that got me IN TO RTS's, is the same franchise that killed my interest in the entire genre
- It's no secret that the only measurable growth the company has seen in the last four or more years has been to basically acquire studios for the name recognition, fire everyone and then curb-stomp the studio out of existence.
- Turning Mass Effect from the engrossing and masterfully immersive action RPG into another "dude brah" game with multiplayer. I refuse to touch Mass Effect 3 on the grounds of I don't want my impression of the series soured by that bastard child of a title, and because of the Origin requirement.
- Basically enabling Crytek to behave like the entitled twits they are and fueling the "PC master race" fanboys so that they can try to be another id, without the years of contributions to the industry at large to back up their aspirations to be a tech demo company. I want to hurl every time I have to deal with someone who spouts off a Crytek game as the "be all, end all" for why PC gaming is superior, but then refuses to see the irony that its bloated nature assures that all but the 1% will ever be able to afford a system that could run it as pretty and fluidly to justify such claims. And just the fact that Crytek continues to very publicly piss and moan whenever they have to optimize ANYTHING is enough to make me wish they got the corporate lashings they deserve, yet THIS is the company EA chooses to let run free. :|
- I was one who wished Bioware just stuck with making a proper KotOR 3. Making it an MMO was a blatant attempt at a cash-grab, true... and at least SW:TOR as a game initially addressed many of the things that bothered me with the genre. Then when F2P was finally introduced, the draconian limitations for free-to-play effectively bastardized every single aspect that was good about the game.
The sad thing is, I could probably go on and on, but I'd sooner hit a character limit before fully expounding upon EA's many failures under this... guy's... tenure. The problem with people like this is that when their executive decisions flounder, they then fire the programmers, artists and simply shut down studios that didn't deserve it. It's about time these executives were forced to face direct consequences for their actions. For his crimes against the game dev community and the gaming community at large, I hope he's earned a lifetime ban from the industry.
Here are some issues that can be laid at Riccitiello's feet: EA employment practices wrt coder tx are not respected. EA game design documents revolve primarily around monetization & maximization of sales. More money is spent at ea on marketing than game development. Riccitiello had poor instincts wrt to gamer players. EA PR is a mess. And finally, EA has a reputation of destroying the internal dynamics of acquired developers.
This has all lead to creatively bankrupt game development and an adversarial relationship with end consumers, which hurts the bottom line.
Simcity was emblematic of EA under Riccitiello and a fitting capstone to his tenure wrt studio management, game development, and customer relations.
Even with him gone, I honestly doubt it'll change EA's culture of customer abusive DRM/mandatory online everything in a way that'll positively benefit them in the long run. They still have people like Frank Gibeau on board who could not be more disconnected from the customer base (and reality too, it seems, based on past statements to the press).
The fact is that EA has a massive and growing problem with their customers. And if shareholders don't understand that the long term prospect for a company that is loathed by its paying customers is not good, then I'm going to be happy to see those shareholders lose their money as EA continues to struggle going forward.
EA needs to start respecting and valuing their customers again. And not just with platitudes. Things like:
Make any social/online aspects of 'single player' games, if they must be included at all, 100% optional.
Either stop forcing the Origin client onto customers who want the games but are unwilling to deal with the client, or change the client functionality, EULA, and TOS to:
1. Allow players to limit what types of information the client can send EA
2. Ensure that the players have an enduring right to play what they have paid for regardless of changes to future TOS/EULA's
3. Stop trying to take away consumer rights like resale or class action suits if you lie or do something illegal. Just stop it. No really, STOP IT or die a corporate death and do everyone a favor.
And NO MORE DRM shenanigans.
Shareholders? Are you listening? Ok...DRM harms the paying customers and pisses them off. Pissed off customers start looking for alternatives to your DRM'd product. In the long run, DRM turns paying customers into the very pirates you are concerned about. The piratical asshats remove the DRM anyway so DRM does NOT impact pirates except for giving them a puzzle to solve and the incentive to be the first to release a crack and enhance their reputation. If you want a company to make money, stop fretting about the asshats who will never buy your company's products and start worrying about pissing off the people who are the source of your company's revenue. And as a bonus, you get to stop paying for the DRM technology/product that turns your customers into pirates so publishing costs are lower.
If EA did this, and committed to it, I'd be willing to forgive and forget. But I doubt that EA and their shareholders will wake up. The only EA game that I'm remotely interested in right now is DA3 and, even then, DA2 nearly turned me off the franchise completely. There's zero chance of me buying it if it comes encumbered with all this online/DRM/Origin shite. And if so, then I am completely done with EA products. Which is a shame as EA have put out some great games in the past. But perhaps my gaming future belongs to more customer friendly developers/publishers like CD Project and Kickstarted projects.