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Riccitiello: Quality, Sales Correlation Takes Time To Show
by Leigh Alexander [PC, Console/PC, Exclusive]
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December 2, 2009
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Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello has made a mantra out of the idea that making game quality the primary goal creates profitability by its nature -- but the relationship between a game's quality, its Metacritic score and its profitability often eludes precise science.
Metacritic rankings certainly may act as at least a partial bellwether for quality levels in a publisher's portfolio, or for trends within a given franchise. But it's never been proven that ratings directly correlate to sales in any meaningful way -- in fact, recent analyst research has shown that scores are among the least-important factors to consumers making new game purchase decisions.
EA may have been stung a little by its own enthusiasm for high scores and the quality-to-sales promise back in 2008, when despite what Riccitiello called at the time a "significant improvement" in game quality -- one of his key stated missions since reassuming leadership of the company -- EA's holiday portfolio didn't meet sales expectations.
That season, the recession arrived late to the previously-triumphant video game biz -- just in time to put some coal in its Christmas stocking -- so it's hard to discern how much of a role the economy played.
Nonetheless, Riccitiello still stands by his faith, and continues trimming EA's slate of games to focus on higher-quality SKUs and not a higher quantity of them -- he says EA has gone from 50-60 titles in fiscal 2009, '10 and '11 to the "high 30s."
"I'm a fundamental believer that quality translates to success," he reiterates to Gamasutra. "I think the equation is as true as it's ever been, but it requires a modification I didn't emphasize enough two years ago."
A poor sequel in a solid franchise may still sell well, because it takes multiple installments for the consumer base to develop an impression of a property significant enough as to impact sales, he asserts. And it goes both ways: It may take more than one improved-quality sequel to regain gamers' faith after an initial poor experience, the CEO adds.
"Back in the '90s we made a great game... the following year, our game was down on quality, but we also sold a lot," he says. "[It took] one or two poor games to actually turn success to failure of a franchise. Consumers read last year’s Metacritic to buy this year’s game."
Faced with poor franchise sales, explains Riccitiello, "the right first step is getting the quality right... but it might take two, if not three editions to fully put it back to [a good] position."
To prove it, challenges the CEO, print out NPD results, or Gfk-Chart-Track results or any other sales charts and look at the top 10: "They're all sequels to prior titles that had high Metacritic scores," he says. "When you consider that, you start to realize that the correlation is there. There's a time lag for titles rising or falling."
The idea that quality is unrelated to sales is "an insult to the industry," Riccitiello says. "Metacritic is not a perfect assessment of quality; it's just the best we've got. I don't think it's the best for casual games, and I don't use it for movie or book reviews. But if I want to understand a game, I can look at the detail... and come to a judgment."
"In a weird sort of way as much as we [at EA] are believers in building quality, we may have inadvertently reduced the argument for people by being a little too simple in explaining it," he concludes. "Quality -- over time -- absolutely matters."
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As for metacritic being the 'best we have' - I can't think of anything better actually... in the sense that you can go there and find actual text reviews to see what people are saying about it. Scores are pointless, like gamerscore they don't prove anything positive or negative about gaming.
More developers need to invest in providing free well-designed demos of games they want to sell, because nothing beats "try-before-buy" when it comes to purchasing decisions and judging the quality of games (especially if the game's focus is gameplay, which can only be experienced via "try-before-buy"). It may take extra work and money to produce these demos, but if the game truly has good quality, people will buy it and the game will sell well. Demos also indicate how much faith the developers have in their creations, so if quality is truly the goal for developers like EA, free demos are the best way to share that quality with us.
The games industry never developed some kind of quality journalism. The score of a game is the number of (paid) previews runf for this game multiplied with the number of ads the publisher acutally runs in the publication or on the website divided with the number of ads he booked for the next 3 month.
The second fault, I think is, that even with quality games journalism, when high review scores equal "good" games, those games would sell automatically better then others.
One of the most successful movies of the year was "Transformers 2", this movie had terrible reviews, all over the planet. But did this harm it's success? No.
Quality and success don't necessary depend on each other. In most cases you can achieve success by heavy marketing, better then by delivering quality.
I actually applaud Nick Earl and John for their focus on quality. I think their efforts to offer new IP to the consumer needs recognition...too bad the consumer is not doing their part here.
Also, I have noticed that user ratings are no better than review ratings and almost always the average user scores for movies and games are > 10% higher than critic reviews. Viewers tend to vote with their emotions so their votes tend to gravitate either very high or very low. In film at least it is usually pretty easy for movie studios (who do tons of market research) to give the public at least some of what they like (sex, humor, or gratuitous special effects) and keep those public scores unrealistically high.
Finally, nearly all press is biased in one way or another towards their audience (in the US much of the network news is politically left, with the obvious exception of Fox news to the right, but all are biased towards American interests and standards as a whole). We also hear all the time about selective journalistic story selection or de-selection based on the whims of the parent company.
Like it or not there is some form of bias there is most mediums, so I do not think our industry is particularly unlucky.
$0.02
High sales increase opinion of a franchise.
Quality games increase opinion of a franchise proportional to sales.
Good opinion of a franchise increases sales.
Since not all of your games will be high-quality successful franchise creators, you want at least one out of the two to boost sales of future installments. This is Capcom's strategy with Street Fighter 4: marketing to the small group of current fans and the large group of previous fans, to create the impression of a franchise both popular and "hardcore."
It sold OK, but the sequel will at least double its precedent's sales. Why? Because most people who have played the first are anxious to get their hands on the sequel, and we can expect at least the same amount of new customers that the first installment attracted.
But some of those titles were fall releases. I've said this before: You can't put an unknown title against a highly anticipated sequel right before Christmas. I think next year's "early releases" (or late, depending on how you look at it) is a small step forward. Unknowns such as Dark Void will have breathing room - away from blockbusters like MW2, or last-year's GTA. New IP needs special care. Anyone who's loyal to an established franchise will buy on release anyway - maybe THOSE titles should wait until summer, with the new stuff being launched in the fall?
But I'm not in anyone's marketing department :-)
Transformers 2 is THE perfect example of why "quality" doesn't work. The tastes of the public and the tastes of gaming journalists have never varied so widely as now, given that the Wii and other shifts in game production have brought more casual users into the fold. The hardcore bias (though not as hardcore as the true hardcore gamers would like) of journalists is pretty obvious. Metacritic scores are actually a really silly way to judge "quality" in terms of saleability for this reason. In fact, since many casual users don't use online forums (which are the best way to gauge user reception of a hardcore game) there really isn't much you can do to figure out what they want except direct polling/surveying or through sales numbers and intuition. While I respect his goal I find his methodology severly flawed.
Quality doesn't work? I guess Blizzard must be bankrupt, then, since they spend so much money on achieving good quality.
Transformers 2 is great support for what Riccitiello was saying above: "A poor sequel in a solid franchise may still sell well, because it takes multiple installments for the consumer base to develop an impression of a property significant enough as to impact sales"
If you actually talk to people about it, tons of people who liked the first either disliked the second or at least, didn't like it as well, but it had great sales because people had a high opinion of the franchise.
Quality may not be the only way to make a successful business, but it's certainly the best way to make long-term profit. Companies that put their money into cheap movie tie-ins or clones of more successful games aren't nearly as successful as companies like Epic and Valve that put out real quality work.
When a company known for quality puts their name onto something, that alone is enough to generate tons of sales. If EA can achieve their goal of having their name associated with quality and keeping it that way, then they'll be one of the companies that's still doing great 15-20 years from now.
And all this coming from the company that publicly stated that Metacritic (!) scores will determine the quality of the software they put out.
Everyone knows that the game review system is flat out broken, and has been for some time now. The average reviewer hardly knows anything about the games they are playing and in their rush to be the first out, they tend to either pass over worthy games or can't be bothered to spend time reviewing them.
Even Metacritic is suspect in that they don't even allow aggregated scores from most reputable sites and most especially not from the more niche sites that review such titles e.g. The Armchair General, RPS etc
Gone are the days when you would read a review tome and come away with everything you need to make up your own mind. Nowadays most reviewers just take the "Idiot's fast guide to 500 words or less" approach and call it a day. The end result is that more involving, different and/or otherwise excellent games (e.g. indie or lower budget games) get passed over or completely trashed because they can't wrap their heads around them.
All this despite the fact that most smaller budget games end up making money, while the heavily marketed ones (the so called "Triple-A") either end up losing money - resulting in job cuts and such - or barely make their money back.
It is unlikely that EA will ever recover from their slump. Since John came back, it appears that there has been a steady downward spiral and with a hammered stock price as evidence of same.
Interesting argument.
I agree with the rest of your analysis on retention and weak endings. I've seen an increase in weak or quickly rushed ending cut scenes.
And although I am replying Joshua McDonald prety late, I would say Blizzard games have just the quality needed by their users (which are always the same). Not saying they are bad games, but the games are always pretty similar. It is a case where they are happy with feeding the fans with just minor updates. EA and other companies usually change the focus of whole franchises to attract new users (Activision switched WWII for current times, EA switched the focus of Need for Speed from simulator to arcade, etc). Blizzard, instead, are happy where they are.
I think Andrew has an argument here. If I look at my local gamestop here in berlin, the XBox360 shelves for used games are filled with GTA IV and Halo3 games.
But I tried to buy a used Super Mario Galaxy and Zelda Twilight Princess for my Wii and it was very hard to find one of them used. I finally tracked down a Zelda for 30€, a Halo3 usually costs 5 € less.
Compare the recent EA practices with Activision's.
EA is absolutely turning around from evil, profit loving monster to more responsible and respectable key player in game industry by creating a lot of great new titles that are both fun, original, and genuinely enjoyable.
However, Activision's strategy, in its CEO's own words, is to "exploit" every possible IP to death. (I feel very, very sorry for the great minds at Infinity Ward. The CEO, Kotick, even said his mission is to "take fun out of game development"!!! @#$%@!!!) Everything they do, they do for profit. To squeeze every penny out of consumers' pocket. They seems to do great right now, but I doubt it'll get too far. Once developers lose their heart in their product from repeated grind to produce same sequel after another, the overall quality will sharply fall, and oh, boy. Good luck recovering from there.
Unless EA's shareholders become impatient and force Riccitello to reverse his strategy, I hope he walks the talk, and show the rest of the industry how it's really done.
IMO, it doesn't really matter how many copies come back to the shelves after a week. If overall sale was that big, then that many copies has been sold no matter what, and that many people are keeping their copies.
Take my gut-feeling opinion with a grain of salt if you will, but I think those titles you mentioned are coming back because of the group of gamers who are in gaming only for campaign modes. Once they finish playing through the campaign, they're completely done with the game. No need to replay, let alone dive into multiplayer fragfest.
The very games you've mentioned, I think, actually have very good retetion. Both Halo 3 and GTA IV's price decreased at snail's pace, asking for full price for new copies even after a full year and a half(!!) since their initial release. (Also consider this: a new copy of CoD4: MW still sells for $49.99.) Comepare that to single-player-only games, like Mass Effect and Assassin's Creed. I bought them new for only $29.99 within a few months after their release.
If you measure a success of a game on retention, the only good game in your view becomes those with good multiplayer games or those released on non-resellable formats, such as on digital distribution. But as you know (I hope), there are many good games on disc with great quality, but without any multiplayer mode. Those games do get moved into used market, but it doesn't mean people don't like them. When sequel comes out, those very people who sold their copy will flock to retail stores, looking for a copy.
So, it's back to sales volume at initial releases.