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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."
Well, hopefully his golden parachute will only be accessible if he maintains a continuous online connection to HR for the next three years.
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.
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.
When a board member calls up the CEO and says that it's unanimous, it's time for you to leave, the CEO can either save face and "resign", or let the board officially vote them out. Regardless of what they're calling it, "fired" is probably an accurate description.
Better known as 318230.
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.
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.
I think this is much more a PR move than it is a financial move.
They want to show that they have "solved" the problem and that it will not happen again, by letting a manager walk. I'm pretty sure the full board of directors knew perfectly well what was going on with Sim City, and it is not likely that the CEO was the only one driving this through.
c++;
... and totally won't just go do the same kind of shit elsewhere.
Actually, I think you might underestimate how "big companies" look to other "big companies" to see what to do and what not to do. If this was some little dev house, no it wouldn't make a difference in the world. Given that it is such a large company, others might actually take some notice.
Also, there is a good chance that given such a negative dismissal, he is going to find it harder to get into the next position. Not to say that he won't, but it likely won't be as good as he had hoped for.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
I offer my services as CEO. I might fail, but I'd be willing to do it at half the price.
I honestly have to wonder, at this point, why somebody hasn't caught on to the 'get random Indian H1Bs to fail at leadership for 40k/year and pocket the savings' strategy...
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
It's a shame you don't feel the same way about code tags....
cheers,
Too bad this didn't happen with Blizzard after Diablo 3 as well. Fuck this always-online NWO bullshit.
He wasn't ousted for DRM, but failing to execute the DRM properly.
If the servers had been even REMOTELY close to sufficient for a day 1 load, the manager would still be onboard and the DRM would be proven successful. As that was not the case, the problem is the manager failing to properly plan for launch day activities. The DRM is still successful and will be implemented in subsequent EA releases.
This signature is false.
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
Yes, but he still gets the "pay over time", just from some other company, because he's a member of the endlessly rotating pool of CxO/Director/Board Members.
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
Slashdot is not the place for speculation.
You're new here, aren't you?
"Engineering is the art of making what you want from things you can get" - Jerry Avins
It's not like departing under good conditions pays worse than departing under bad ones.
His career just got derailed. Who's gonna hire a guy who presided over the biggest disaster ever at his previous company? Leaving on good terms, or quitting, or resigning, all have the potential for later career opportunities. Getting fired and told you're a complete and abject failure? Not so much.
In yours and my world, yes. For CEOs, not necessarily. They live by different rules and have far greater connections. Very easy for him to tell his cronies it was some underling and he just took the fall because that's what good CEOs do.
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 !
Allow me to say that this is further proof that VOTING WITH YOUR DOLLARS WORKS and it works VERY well, its just not magical or instant.
Remember folks this is NOT just about SImcity, its about how under his watch sales have gone down as he ran off more and more customers with douchebag behavior, from gouging on DLC to bad DRM schemes to bad services like Origin John Riccitiello has done for EA what Steve Ballmer has done for MSFT, run it into the ground. And I'm proud to say many folks have voted with their wallets and refused to buy these "DRMapaloza" games that treat the customer as a criminal, just look at how hard Activision and Ubisoft had their sales hit for this kind of shit, with Ubisoft going so far as to remove it from their games and apologize for it.
So just don't buy products that treat you like crap, vote with your wallet and you CAN change things, just not overnight. EA under John Riccitiello has been widely derided for bad behavior so its really no surprise that people voted with their wallets, we need to continue to refuse to buy products that treat us like crap. As long as D3 is always online I won't have it, i instead bought my friends and family Torchlight II instead, I refuse to buy any game that treats me badly and encourage everyone to do the same as we CAN make a difference, it just takes time.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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.)
His one-time payout should be a game of his choice from EA's portfolio or five dollars off of his next purchase of an EA game.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
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.
Scott Thompson, fired from Yahoo. Hired on by Shoprunner.
Fired for lying on his resume, not because he ran the company into the ground. Despite this, he went from being the man in charge of a company on the Fortune 500 list (barely, at 483), to being in charge of a company that, uhh... doesn't even have a wikipedia page. I had to dig this up to find out what the company even did. It's a startup company nobody's ever heard of.
Léo Apotheker, fired from HP. Hired on as Chairman of the Board for DMK.
HP: Ranked the 10th largest company on the Fortune 500 list. Lost over $300 billion in market capitalization under Apotheker's leadership.
DMK: Doesn't exist.
KMD: Does exist... and is a Danish IT firm with 3,000 employees. Is not on the list. Also... Chairman of a board is not the same as CEO of a company, so it's a false analogue anyway! But let's say he was the CEO -- he went from one of the largest companies on Earth to some tiny po-dunk company in another country.
Dick Fuld, CEO of Lehman Brothers, went on to work at Matrix Advisors and Legend Securities.
Lehman Brothers: Suffered a total existance failure under Dick's fearless leadership. Was only publicly traded for about a decade before folding. In other words, a nothing commanded by a nobody.
Matrix Advisors and Legend Securities: A hedge fund. It's not even a proper company. And it's primary source of income? The money that Dick was able to hide from creditors when he bankrupted both himself and his former company. Like, for example, the mansion he purchased just before it went under that he sold to his wife for $100 to evade creditors.
So as you can see, each of these people didn't get to "keep their cushy jobs"... every mistake led to a dramatic downward step in their cash flow. Far from proving me wrong, you've managed to brilliantly prove my point: CEOs get just as big of a black mark when they're fired as "the peons" do. All three of the examples you provided resulted in someone being a CEO on paper only -- they were never given a real company, with real money, to play with again.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
It wasn't the "voting with dollars" that did this (or rather non-voting), and I would continue to argue that individual purchases don't do dick. What made a difference here was PUBLIC SPEECH, outrageously bad reviews, blog posts, and forum discussions. This is what forced EA spokespersons to take up the issue publicly and make detailed responses; the wildfire of public condemnation. And communities organizing to protest and boycott in the future.
Probably more difference was made by people who DID buy the game, and reported honestly how wretched it was, then someone like myself, who never had any prospect of even possibly buying this game.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
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.