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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."
Yay!
Also more likely the first to say: its != it's. Yay for slashdot editors.
Someone at a high level paying the price for DRM-incurred failure. Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out, asshole.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
Serious question... is this the first time an exec was ousted for a mistake with DRM?
The guy tendered resignation. The letter he wrote is in that link there. Besides of that EA has been all over the place in terms of performance for awhile. I picked up a few hundred shares at $12 ~6mo ago and sold them at $18.50, which while not a spectacular turn around was decent enough.
Om, nomnomnom...
Well, hopefully his golden parachute will only be accessible if he maintains a continuous online connection to HR for the next three years.
The press release doesn't mention anything about SimCity. Could it be other causes and you're just trying to bend the message to your own personal fantasies? In any case, I doubt it'll have any real effect on the user of DRM.
I still play that game and it was sooo fucking close to a Wow killer. They rushed it without dailies and raids to meet Christmas projection marks in some accountants spreadsheet and they killed the game cards and the expansion at the store and gave up too early.
I do not care what other say about SWTOR it is not failure and much better. Bioware did great things and they got rid of great people too quickly. Another 6 months when SWTOR had the dailies, raids, and fixes it would have 3x the amount of subscribers.
What a shame and I am irritated as I do not want to go back to Wow.
http://saveie6.com/
... this does give him more time to play SimCity.
SimCity was the tipping point.
Remember, EA was recently ranked as the Worst Company in America. Gamers have been complaining about EA way before SimCity. Like when EA negotiated an exclusive rights deal on all NFL games and then churned out the worst NFL games for years and years to come. They have ruined many, many franchises.
Good riddance. Now kindly proceed rolling heads throughout all upper and middle management, until you get to the first employee who indicated that the always-online feature was an indescribably bad idea. He or she is new CEO.
"The more corrupt the state, the more it legislates." - Tacitus
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.
I guess John Riccitiello couldn't get past Turbo Tubes...
Charisma is the measure of someone's ability to lie with a straight face.
While it's nice to speculate that the guy was fired for reasons that suit the average slashdotter's predilection's about DRM, there is no evidence that this is the case.
Good God.
I know this is /. and no one RTFA and all but seriously, at least try to search for key words like "Sim" or "City" before submitting an article with a moronic sensationalist headline like this.
His resignation has nothing to do with Sim City. Dream on.
Disclaimer: My opinions are my own and do not, in any way, reflect the opinions of my employer or university.
It may have more to do with the fact EA stock went from $40 to $20 since he took office and there are plenty within and without the company that want to move into mobile gaming more and he's in the way. The board may also believe fresh blood will bring in a new way of doing things in the gaming sphere. I hope they take this opportunity to actually do some worthwhile changes; first being getting rid of or at least finding a better DRM mechanism (since I'm sure there are some dinosaurs who think DRM is still a workable system) and branch out.
They should learn a lesson from Atari. Inheritence isn't how you hold on to the throne. If blood must be spilled, then so be it.
If computers were people, I'd be a misanthrope.
Perhaps the next EA CEO might see about some of the IP they are sitting on and make something decent that isn't just the same junk over and over.
Wing Commander, Ultima (I know there is are games in the works, but it would be nice to see Ultima 8 stricken off the books, and a "real" 8 and 9 made. Heck, I'd love to see a modern rendition of "Cybermage" just for the surreal aspect that mixes magic and technology, and not being Shadowrun or steampunk.
When the spokeswoman for Electronic Arts stated that they would try to restore trust with their users I never fathomed that they would actually follow that up with action. I cannot begin to overstate my congratulations to the board of Electronic Arts for doing the right thing and ousting a CEO that had declared his customers the defacto enemy.
When the lies came out that the online requirement was for server processing I took it as yet another BS statement from a company that held it's customers in contempt. When customers showed how easily you could play offline the lie was exposed and Maxis / EA was forced to admit the truth. I never expected that action would come out of this, and must say I am surprised by this as anything in technology in twenty years. Congratulations to EA for taking a step in trying to restore the trust of your customers.
"The disastrous launch of SimCity took it's first major toll
Look, I'm getting sick of this. Just leave out the fucking unnecessary apostrophes OK? What are you, 7? How hard is it to learn the bloody rule and use it? Not hard at all - I've known it since I was seven!
I do not expect to see this happen ever again. Thankyou.
We have no idea this was the reason and I would bet EA does NOT blame DRM for the failure. Especially given the fact that the servers do little processing (as we now know). I am sure they blame server engineering for being unprepared, or the guy who didn't sign the big server check, or the team responsible for forecasting. I can almost guarantee they do not blame DRM, since your gamer brethren BOUGHT THE GAME knowing DRM was in there.
Only if DRM disappears from EA games in the future, can you declare victory.
Anyone who pre-ordered through origin (like me) received $20 off coupon for a purchase of $30 or more through origin. Not a bad deal, I could pick up C&C franchise for $29.99 and add a $5 or $10 filler to break that threshold.. sure I'd be giving them a bit more money but every C&C game ever made for $20 seemed like a good deal. However the fine print says the offer expired today at 10am PDT. I don't recall seeing the limitation to the offer until after I had purchased the game.
Today I got the email telling me I'll get a free game due to the Sim City fuckup. It's not fine print this time but the email says that eventually we'll be able to choose our game (doesn't say when exactly) but we have to have it downloaded by March 30th. They want to limit their "losses" by making the instructions difficult to understand and leaving a very short window to "cash in".
EA are a bunch of dicks (I knew it already, just felt like reiterating).
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
First, it wasn't necessarily the failure of SimCity that caused the job change. Second, the existence of the DRM wasn't the reason SimCity is a disaster.
SimCity is a disaster because of the implementation of the DRM, the PR surrounding the DRM, and then the fact that it's just a completely broken non-simulation.
Implementation failure.
Just having an account sign-on for DRM authentication is a thumbs-down, for sure, but it isn't a guaranteed game killer. Case in point, StarCraft 2. I do not like having to sign on to play the single player campaigns, but I've never had a problem logging in, even on day 1 of Wings of Liberty or day 1 of Heart of the Swarm.
With SimCity, however, I was unable to log on and play for 3 days after launch. After that I never had server problems, but there are many people who are still unable to stay connected or who are having their cities (which are saved on EA's computers) erased or rolled back.
The lesson is, if you're going to force people to sign on to play a single-player game, you better fucking make sure they can sign on to play their single-player game.
PR failure
I don't think Blizzard ever lied to people about why they had to sign on to battle.net for StarCraft. "It's 'cause DRMs." Lucy Bradshaw, the Maxis spokesweasal has stated that SimCity just had to be always connected because EA's servers are performing "significant computations" that just have to be done by their servers. Their terrible "sims go the nearest house to sleep" AI has gotta be run on their Beowulf cluster of HAL 9000s. The beast of a gaming rig under my desk clearly isn't up to the task.
Of course this is a monstrously stupid lie, and obvious to anyone who has any experience with video games or computers or breathing. This falls into the "pissing on me and telling me it's raining" category. If you're going to piss on me, at least be honest about it. And don't eat asparagus first.
Game failure
Despite all that, the real problem with SimCity is once you actually are able to get in and play, you find that they did not actually make a city simulation game, they just made a pretty city drawing program.
You lay out reasonable street designs, but they get snarled with traffic because the sims do not know where they're going to end up when they leave their homes for work in the morning or when they come home at night. They pick as their destination the nearest place that meets their need and go there first via the shortest path. If when they get there they find the place is already filled up, they go to the next closest place. So imagine if all 400 people who live in your neighborhood were coming home from work at the same time, but instead of going to their actual homes (or whatever place they're going to end up sleeping) they all came to your house first. And after 2 of them crash on your floor, the remaining 398 go next door and all knock there. And then the remaining 396 go to the next house after that, etc etc.
Next, the whole RCI balance mechanic has been the core of SimCity forever, and that's completely gone. Residential areas are supposed to need Commercial areas so people have a place to buy things (or work). Commercial needs shoppers, workers, and goods. Industry provides jobs for residents and goods for Commerce. They broke all of that, because sims, it seems, can live on love. All they need to not move out of their homes is "happiness," which can be obtained from shopping (commerce) but can also be obtained from city parks. So people have made 400k+ population cities that are absolutely nothing but residential high rises and parks. The people have no jobs and no money and no food, but they can still live in gleaming skyscrapers because I guess they're urban foraging in the parks.
So, yeah, you can "solve the puzzle" and make cities that don't collapse, but they're completely ridiculous, so it's not a city simulation game. It'd be like having a flight simulator where the rudder has no effect on y
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
We are all assuming that this is specifically because of the botched Sim City release. While it may be very compelling and possibly even obvious to think so, there is no mention of SimCity in the article. It's all speculation by the poster. It might be true, but it makes for a slanted summary. You can see from this thread that it had a definite affect on the discussion.
An article I read on Forbes today about this didn't mention Sim City as a reason either. The announcement came with the report that Q4 earnings at EA were lower than expected. The server issues, may have had something to do with this and maybe even a big part, but the summary jumps to conclusions. Pretty much this entire thread is following suit.
Whether or not that asshole got sacked, or how he got sacked, isn't important
What's more important is if EA gonna let users enjoy SC5 without been unnecessarily burdened by the online DRM ?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I offer my services as CEO. I might fail, but I'd be willing to do it at half the price.
See, that is the problem. If they pay less for you, you must be worth less.
You need to say you'll work for only 10 percent more than the outgoing CEO did.
Insane Executive Search Committees think that way. They're really really really really stupid.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
First, it wasn't necessarily the failure of SimCity that caused the job change. Second, the existence of the DRM wasn't the reason SimCity is a disaster.
SimCity is a disaster because of the implementation of the DRM, the PR surrounding the DRM, and then the fact that it's just a completely broken non-simulation.
No, the DRM turned a product launch glitch from a "no patches yet" minor issue into a always-on "NO GAME FOR YOU" utter debacle.
There are ways to have an online capability be semi-optional.
Have only the online servers be used for city-to-city competitions, but single player (just me and my quadrants) run locally.
Have only extra add ons be from the server - and give away free ones - this is what they do at EA Maxis for Sims 3 - if you login you can download new content, from other players, and Gold (pay extra) crafted items - this could be used for extra disaster scenarios, special buildings, etc. You charge for the chrome, like they do in China and South Korea. You can play without Chrome, but most people will pay a small amount for Chrome.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
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.)
He was fired. At the CEO level, they don't hand you a check and take your key and have the security droid escort you out of the building. He's being paid what his contract says he will be paid when he is terminated, and the face-saving fiction is that he is allowed to resign effective March 30. However, make no mistake; he was fired.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Oh agreed. That's the other terrible decision by the EA management. I understand that EA had decided they wouldn't green light anymore single player games (citation googlable). "The future is social cloudified experiences! I read that in the inflight magazine, so you programmers best do it!" So in order to make a SimCity game, EA demanded it be multiplayer. But who the hell wants that? As a long-time SimCity player, I certainly do not. I do not want other players in my region that I have to wait on or rely on for services or, anything really. I do like multiplayer games, for sure. But not SimCity. I really don't want an online, "social" version of tetris, either.
Shoehorning online DRM into the game and then trying to spin it as "our vision for a multiplayer experience" and "we're doin' cackalashuns!" was a disaster. And an obviously foreseeable one.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Agreed, but what do you expect them to sample?
A global statistical model? They claim not to have one.
A Population of actors doing rational things? They didn't seem to implement one.
As he refuses to greenlight single player games.
Which should not be construed as even a suggestion that the man should lose his job. I don't believe the appropriate response here would be to destroy a man's livelihood. I would like him to reconsider his policy, though.
Having worked in a company that big, there's nothing the CEO could have done about it. Everyone would have lied to him "oh, it's going good, it'll be great" if he asked, and he'd be so far out of development, he'd have no way of knowing that something was buggy or not ready. Just have to shuffle CEOs around so that they look like they are worth $100,000,000 per year, when they outsource on the basis of "supply and demand" and any of a million people would take his job, and apparently, not many could do it worse.
Learn to love Alaska
I have a hard time accepting that. Rollercoaster Tycoon, released 14 years ago, was able to simulate a theme park with 1,000s of actors without too much difficulty. I remember the game was able to run pretty well on my Pentium 2 at the time.
Comparing the processors, I see that today's i3s run about 100x more flops than p2. (i3 ~ 25 Gflops, p2 ~ 0.23 Gflops).
Given the resources that EA/Maxis has (compared with 1 developer programming the whole thing), I think they probably could have programmed it to simulate ~100,000 citizens at acceptable speed on midrange hardware. So I think it probably boiled down to more a question of priority than possibility.
Gorobei's point is that the simulation approach to SC5 is fundamentally different to the older "Sim" games - the older games, as you say, modelled the entire organism (theme park, in the case of Rollercoaster Tycoon) and generated the actors within that simulation based on a group of relatively simple statistical behaviours - a certain percentage will head for the next ride, a certain percentage will puke as they come off the rollercoaster (always a goal of mine when playing that game), some will go and eat, and so on. The graphics are then generated to put a visual representation on those statistical behaviours.
SC5, on the other hand, turns that model upside down - now, instead of having a single simulated organism (the theme park or city) with a small number of centres for behaviour collection (rides in the theme park, city zones/buildings/events in Sim City) for which to generate the statistical behaviours that your actors will show, now each individual actor is their own organism - the model is too complex to resort to "averaging" and modeling the overall system, but it is not complex enough to give each actor enough behaviours to be able to form creative solutions such as taking a detour around a road block.
In that sense, SC5 is going in the right direction, but until the models for the actors are complex enough that they can appear semi-intelligent, the gameplay result is going to feel inferior to what it has replaced.
A PC could easily handle that level of simulation because you don't have to calculate everything every frame. The simulation is asynchronous to the GUI.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I keep reading this regurgitated as fact. I also read from some who apparently know what they are talking about that parts of the population is being modeled in independent simulations, while the rest is more emergent, and that the videos you mention capture only the anomalies.
Also,I understand that EA were forced to tone down the simulations because of the back-end availability problems.
You and others make it sound as if the game does nothing but 1980s Pac-Man AI.
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
One bloke intent on building a game so deep that it takes sixteen materials and four different crafts to create a metal bucket (then measures individual happiness on how pretty it is) is modelling individual actors right down to the loss of an arm, the saving that makes in gloves, the work that individual can now do and how upset his family are about it.
And EA with a budget in the tens of millions can't even work out basics such as 'works here, earns that, lives there, wants food/entertainment/job/sleep'..
Hell, the Tropico series manages it, and they depict all of the individuals. Crunching the numbers in the background without displaying each person is easier, and should scale up to SimCity levels. Certainly for the first few hundred thousand.
He's a figurehead and a spokesperson at big events, but ultimately is only as good as his advisors and staff. He can't be at every interview for coders, or even interviews for the HR people who hire the coders. He has to trust his staff to do their job, and they didn't. I see this as more of a marketing selling an idea up the food chain, and dev trying their best to hold it together while sticking to their ridiculous deadlines.
The next CEO will be in exactly the same position, because everyone else responsible is still in their position of responsibility.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Have you even played the game? I've clocked about 40 hours and the sims really do go into teh first available house. And the schoolbusses all go to the same stop. And all the moving vans spawn at the exact same time.
Freight does nothing.
Sims will not cross the road to go shopping even if they have money and the shop is of the right level.
If you have a single tourist in your city then the simulation builds hundred or perhaps thousands of hotel beds... then the hotels gets abandoned because they don't have costumers and you demolish it and start again hoping that it won't turn into a useless hotel.
If there is a hidden proper simulation then it is disabled or being ran on so few sims that it's virtually untracable.
I don't disagree with anything you said, but just as much as its not DRM (borked), its not the game play (borked) but the marketing failure he is being ousted for.
From what I have seen there is simply no indication anyone writing official communications from EA recognizes the problems from our perspective. As far as they are concerned they think "he did not sell it right", and as far as the investors/sheep/dollars and cents all play together they might be correct.
Yea its pretty disappointing as product but I don't think that is what is driving the musical chairs game starting to play out at EA.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Loss of an arm? DF models it down to individual fingers and toes, and fingernails and toenails. It's quite possibly one of the most painfully accurate anatomy simulation available in an RPG.
And it's probably why I've never been able to play more than about 15 minutes minutes of it before giving up in frustration and going back to something less tedious, like Hydlide or Battletoads.
Much of the industry had already expected Ricitello to get fired months ago after it became clear that he'd directed hundreds of millions of dollars into Old Republic, and produced poor-to-lukewarm revenues from the result.
Putting that much investment into Old Republic was definitely the CEO's choice of direction. I agree with others above that SC5 was only the straw that broke the camel's back. Old Republic is what cracked it.
(It's not even that Old Republic was a bad game, it just produced really poor ROI after consuming an enormous amount of the company's investments).
If they'd had a DRM authentication requirement and it didn't stop people from playing the game, and the game were good, there wouldn't be a problem (for most users).
For most gamers, that's an acceptable compromise. Yes, there are some costs, but people are willing to pay that. Some gamers refuse to do DRM on principle, and there's a part of the gaming market that caters to them, but for the rest, all they care about is enjoying the game. If they get to enjoy their game, who is anyone else to deny them their enjoyment?
This failure is going to encourage companies to do DRM non-intrusively (more effort, more expensive), or avoid it altogether (cheaper). That's still a positive step IMAO.