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Electronics Arts CEO Ousted In Wake of SimCity Launch Disaster
mozumder writes "The disastrous launch of SimCity took its first major toll, with EA CEO John Riccitiello being fired from his position and removed from the Board of Directors. It is unknown what effect this may have on the SimCity franchise or any future DRM of EA games, but clearly someone didn't think their cunning plan all the way through when they decided to implement always-on connections for single-player gaming."
He'll somehow have to scrape by on 24 months of full pay (and stock vesting):
http://www.polygon.com/2013/3/18/4120344/ea-ceo-john-riccitiello-quits
As part of Riccitiello's separation agreement, he'll receive 24 months of salary continuation and continued vesting of unvested stock options until Nov. 30, 2013, with those options exercisable until Feb. 28, 2014.
Serious question... is this the first time an exec was ousted for a mistake with DRM?
This isn't necessarily about DRM. EA is going to miss the financial projections they made at the end of Jan. He's leaving before the board and shareholders come after him with pitchforks.
A board of directors is generally responsible for things like regulatory issues. They may not even know what Sim City was until it became a PR disaster.
Paul Vivek -- from GE
Leonard Coleman -- from Heinz and baseball team owner (probably helps on sports licensing)
Jay Hoag -- finance guy
Jeffrey Huber -- adverting
Maffei -- media
Ubinas -- Ford
Simonsian -- mobile expert
3 ex EA guys
Riccitiello's 10-point plan to Success
1. Buy Franchise
2. Water Down Experience for Casual Players
3. Add Online
4. Add Co-op
5. Add Gritty Camera Filters
6. Overwork Developers
7. Pretend Game is Finished
8. Add DLC / Make Old Features New by Converting Them to DLC
9. Pay for Good Reviews
10. Hype the Fuck Out of The Game
It's not the DRM (a real screw-up) but the fact that the entire underlying game is borked.
All that cool "model each sim, global structure emerges" rather than "model the global structure, visualize it with animations of sim" seems to be faked. All the fakery means the global structure of the game is just broken: you can't build a large functional city in any reasonable way.
For example, sims leave work, drive home, and pick the first random house they see. They they get wealthy/educated for the next day based on the house they are in. Sure, you get some emergent structure, but it's nothing like a real city or even previous simcity games.
Path-finding seems borked: shortest path is picked over fastest path. All your fire-trucks race to the single closest fire. Left-turns are a recipe for endless traffic jams. Forget using mass transit usefully.
The YouTube videos show all this. It seems beyond fixing, unless they can revert to the old statistical simulation model somehow: one PC doesn't have enough compute to run a large city - they could offload to the cloud (ha, they aren't going that,) or rope the GPU into doing clever sim work (that's a research project.)