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Former Exec Says Electronic Arts "Is In the Wrong Business"
Mitch Lasky was the executive vice president of Mobile and Online at Electronic Arts until leaving the publisher to work at an investment firm. He now has some harsh things to say about how EA has been run over the past several years, in particular criticizing the decisions of CEO John Riccitiello. Quoting:
"EA is in the wrong business, with the wrong cost structure and the wrong team, but somehow they seem to think that it is going to be a smooth, two-year transition from packaged goods to digital. Think again. ... by far the greatest failure of Riccitiello's strategy has been the EA Games division. JR bet his tenure on EA's ability to 'grow their way through the transition' to digital/online with hit packaged goods titles. They honestly believed that they had a decade to make this transition (I think it's more like 2-3 years). Since the recurring-revenue sports titles were already 'booked' (i.e., fully accounted for in the Wall Street estimates) it fell to EA Games to make hits that could move the needle. It's been a very ugly scene, indeed. From Spore, to Dead Space, to Mirror's Edge, to Need for Speed: Undercover, it's been one expensive commercial disappointment for EA Games after another. Not to mention the shut-down of Pandemic, half of the justification for EA's $850MM acquisition of Bioware-Pandemic. And don't think that Dante's Inferno, or Knights of the Old Republic, is going to make it all better. It's a bankrupt strategy."
I thought Mirror's Edge SUCKED. The concept was new (over say Prince of Persia) only in the fluidity it provided, but that was it. That game should have been 3 times longer, almost no load screens, and actually have some of the moves presented in the load screens. I basically felt like a mouse in a maze designed for 2 yr olds. Not to mention that game seemed entirely unfinished. A college friend of mine basically designed something similar using the unreal engine on a 3d map of downtown Atlanta. It took _him_ 6 months.
Dragon Age: Origins sucks too. Its a poorly thought out game in terms of player interaction and field layout (I don't like having entrances 1/2 mile away from a village that I just world mapped to). It was also _pointlessly_ complicated to remove value from the actual game play. I don't want to play D&D with 10 times more crap. Lets not even start on the "Just wait here while I go <Download New Content>." That's just a few, there are tons of crap in most EA games.
Here is what's common among EA games: Art, Marketing, DLC, Prices, and Bugs. EA games belong in a Museum of Art, cause that is what they are... NOT games. EA Marketing is the perfect case study for any marketing class in the world. EA has made DLC mean secondary charges to your CC and the equivalent of SP1 & SP2 for Windows. Prices & Bugs.... nuff said.