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EA CEO's Departure Might Be Good For the Company
Nerval's Lobster writes "Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello might have resigned in the wake of the company's disastrous SimCity launch, but his departure might not be a bad thing for EA as a company. On Glassdoor, his 59 percent rating was 9 points below the average. One outside recruiter says Riccitiello's taken the fun out of the game maker's culture. 'They've never had a problem getting good talent and that's not likely to change,' says the recruiter, who requested anonymity because of his business dealings with the company. 'But, they've had problems getting great talent and that's not likely to change.' Let this be a lesson to gaming executives everywhere: if you're going to launch a popular title that needs to be constantly connected to online servers, make sure you have enough backend infrastructure in place to actually handle the load."
A related article suggests EA needs to worry less about piracy and more about the company's apathy and legitimate customers who demanded a refund.
>>if you're going to launch a popular title that needs to be constantly connected to online servers
It all comes down to "needs"
The reason they gave for being online was that they were running parts of the simulation your computer couldn't handle. That was a lie. They aren't simulating anything. People go to the nearest open job or house. Pathfinding is broken. It has nothing to do with their "infrastructure" and everything to do with them trying to sell you an unfinished product with no demo under the guise of DRM.
this: https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=Linear&chdeh=1&chfdeh=0&chdet=1363731839991&chddm=581026&chls=IntervalBasedLine&q=NASDAQ:EA&&fct=big&ei=S-VIUeiEAcmpigLBMw
In 3010, the potatoes triumphed
and I would never work for EA. They're a sweat shop. I realized earlier on that I wasn't meant to be a game developer, but I've know several friends that have bumped through the EA treadmill who've left burnt out and miserable.
This may very well be the life of a most game devs, but I don't feel like 60 hour weeks is conducive to a healthy long term career with a company.
As a user, since they've introduced Origin, I've bought one game (ME3) reluctantly, and quite frankly the EA label is a LARGE detriment to my decision for buying games. I was in fact intrigued at buying Sim City for $40 from Amazon before launch, but I was a little Leary about it. Now I think Ubisoft's a little rotten with this whole push for uPlay, but at least they're playing ball with Steam if nothing else.
All that said, I'm VERY glad that the Indy scene seems to be picking up steam both in volume and quality. I'm sure Kickstarter and other such initiatives are helping lead us to a hopefully more diverse and healthy product ecosystem.
Bye!
I hate giving the bad guys ideas, but P2P really can reduce your server load by a great deal. Essentially, use other random players to simulate a server for you, or just check for hacks and keep your state. Then when the game is shutdown, if you don't do an eloquent shutdown yourself, the other players check their data against each other to make sure they're not hackers, then they send your state to the main server.
It sounds like these guys tried to use an always on clientserver architecture which works for World of Warcraft, but the costs of which aren't sustainable for a game people might want to play 5-10 years down the road. Maybe EA just banked on the "fly by night" sim city where they take your money, then laugh in 2 years when people get cut off like they do with their EA sports games.
God spoke to me
Either he failed and got sacked or he was the bestestest goddamn CEO of them all, choose one already
I don't understand why they are doing all this adulation, it makes EA look like they are letting their best man (in the whole damn company!) go, just say "No more work for you!, NEXT!"
"if you're going to launch a popular title that needs to be constantly connected to online servers"
Seriously who lets this shit past review. While I would love EA to be suffering and the CEO to be ousted because of the DRM BS it simply isn't true. The CEO has been underperforming for some time, the companies shares are down as is its financial performance and it has little to do with SimCity.
Given EA's corporate culture, it's entirely possible that the CEO is just a fall guy. The investors want blood, and somebody has to get fired. Unless their next CEO is someone who loves gaming things are just going to stay the same. The trouble with media companies in general is that their upper management seems to think differently from normal people; that is, they think in terms of monetizing things as much as possible without regard to how their customers might feel about that in the long term.
EA's nasty DRM doesn't just prevent people from pirating their games, it also prevents customers from modding their games. Preventing mods allows them to make more money from "microtransactions", by selling silly little things that the player community could easily mod in if the game allowed it (and the value of these add-ons in terms of gameplay tends to be extremely poor). Conversely, you have companies like Bethesda who (while still copy protecting their games) allow people to create their own modifications, and then make money selling legitimate DLC with tens of hours of content each.
Point is, I highly doubt it's just the CEO who's thinking that the best way to maximize profits is to sell a game and then nickel and dime people with stupid, worthless addons that take no effort to create. I'm guessing this is the attitude of the board of directors and upper management as well, and just replacing one dude isn't going to fix that.
All true. Although if the sim city launch hadn't been botched so badly and instead had gone off brilliantly then perhaps the 'underperforming shares' trend might have reversed enough to preserve him.
It would take far far more than a single games success to turn them around. The problem with multi billion dollar companies is it is like a bus hurtling down a hill, SimCity if successful would be like downshifting gears. It may slow the decent but it would take a shit load more to stop the bus let alone turn it around.
Okay, so Enron fudged it, but insurance companies in general are all about building a business speculating on what will "probably" happen. The things that let them keep going are in-depth risk analysis, diversification, and a fat cushion of capital. As long as they're right sufficiently more often than they're wrong, then they win overall.
Not that this will help EA out any, but that bit bugged me.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Turning customers off, driving them away, getting them into the habit of going elsewhere for whatever they're after is the REAL problem for any business.
EA's suffered from the common attitude of Corporate America: "We own our customers." SimCity 5 is a symptom, attitude is the cause.
I really don't understand why people were insane enough to buy SC5 in the first place, given EA's rep for crappy games and crappier treatment. You can live a couple of weeks without buying a luxury and thereby save yourself the trouble of demanding a refund or taking EA up on their "here's a crappy game to make up for the crappy game you bought" offer.
Warren Buffet backstops earthquake insurance in the state of California. He takes in millions every year in free money to provide reinsurance to California insurance companies.
What this means is that if there is ever an earthquake in California that exceeds more than $5 Billion in insurance payments, Berkshire Hathaway is on the hook for any payments exceeding that amount. AFAIK he has no upper ceiling on his liability. If the big one hit southern California it's conceivable that his entire company would go bankrupt backstopping the insurance market.
Does Buffet worry about it? No. His reason boils down to the odds of that earthquake ever happening. He gets millions of dollars of free money to invest every year by taking this risk. In fact almost his entire empire has been built leveraging insurance money of one form or another. He's so important in the insurance industry that when he refused to insure losses due to terrorist attacks that policy was then adopted by nearly every insurance company in America.
simcity was just the turd on the shit mountain.
if it failed to hit it's targets because of drm or not doesn't really matter, only that it didn't sell crazy matters.
it's kinda funny though since their servers were doomed just with the load they knew was going to hit them.. much less if it had become a runaway hit(I don't really see it hitting it as big as sims... it's not really a game for the sims players nor for the simcity fans it seems).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Prepare for some incoming.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
SimCity is a really bad game and I certainly hope that heads will roll for ramming an unfinished, needlessly server dependent game into the fans eager hands just to try and make some numbers for the quarter... but is Riccitiello really leaving directly as a result of it? Yeah, there's the timing of it, but the reason EA gives for the departure is they're going to be about $100 million lower on their guidance than they expected. Could they really be $100 million short this quarter from SimCity?
So what are the numbers... SimCity sold 1.1 million copies at launch. For comparison the super-popular Skyrim had a $450 million dollar launch at 3.3 million copies. From that perspective, it certainly looks like SimCity really did make that dent... And considering SimCity 4 is still selling 10 years later, the money they're missing out on over the next 5 to 10 years could be ridiculous.
Look, the consensus seems to be that he was "CEO fired", which involves a lot more politeness and face saving then when the common worker drones are fired.
So if the board did in fact "fire" him, then if his departure is _not_ good for the company then they made the wrong decision. You don't fire any employee, CEO or drone, in the belief that it's going to make things worse for the company (or rather the owners/board of the company) than the alternatives.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
I think people are overcomplicating this departure. I'd be surprised if it had the slightest thing to do with the latest upsets involving the company (SimCity and Real Racing 3). Rather, I think the share price decline - and hence the departure - is being driven by one very simple thing.
spunkgargleweewee
Forget all the "free to play" and "pay to win" crap. Investors know where the money in gaming is right now. It's in spunkgargleweewee. They look at Activision's profits from Call of Duty and think "I want a bit of that".
Until late last year, EA had a story to tell on this. The Medal of Honor reboot did ok. Not brilliantly, but ok. It got a foot in the door. Battlefield 3 did a bit more than that. It did quite well; it got a lot of the casual spunkgargleweewee drinker crowd playing because it tickled their tastebuds and it got a good degree of core-game interest because it was clear that the tech powering it was likely to be the starting point for the next console generation.
But then Medal of Honor: Warfighter happened. Crap marketing. Crap game. Profoundly negative appeal (for all sorts of cultural reasons) to the non-US market. Critical disaster. Commercial disaster.
Suddenly, EA no longer has a story to tell its investors on spunkgargleweewee. In this most important of markets, the graph no longer trends upwards.
That, more than anything else, will be what has driven this. Not proactive consumer boycotts. Not online protests. But the fact that their spunkgargleweewee ended up as a disappointment.
Okay, so Enron fudged it, but insurance companies in general are all about building a business speculating on what will "probably" happen. The things that let them keep going are in-depth risk analysis, diversification, and a fat cushion of capital. As long as they're right sufficiently more often than they're wrong, then they win overall.
Not that this will help EA out any, but that bit bugged me.
True that, but there's a huge difference between the accuracy of actuarial tables and that of marketing projections.
The insurance companies have to have the best, verifiable numbers possible to get a reasonable idea of how much they will have to pay out in an average year, so they can size their premiums accordingly. If they just say fugit and place the premiums at a hundred times what they figure they might pay out in a year, people simply won't buy their product. Those projections have to be based on the best information the companies can find, with very little room for corporate delusions.
Marketing and software development, on the other hand, is rife with self-delusion and speculation. With the advent of computers, that branch of salespeople now have a ready-made troll to beat when their overly optimistic estimates don't come close to the actuals...it must be them dam dirty pirates again, boss!
The existence of a pirated copy of a game does not equate directly to a lost sale any more than tripling the insurance premiums equates directly to profit. Some people will go ahead and pay the cost, while many, many others will refuse at any cost. True, they shouldn't be looking to benefit from the product without paying some price, but the gaming company cannot seriously claim that everyone who tries a game for shits and giggles would have bought it if they couldn't play the pirated version. That's like Luis Vuitton claiming that everyone who buys a knock-off handbag would have bought a real handbag if the knockoff weren't available...yeah, fat chance of that! It's much more likely that the game would have simply faded into obscurity, because people weren't interested enough to buy it so nobody's talking about it...
What the company does gain from piracy, however, is word of mouth marketing for their game. Pissing off their customers with DRM nightmares...well, that's also a form of word of mouth marketing.
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
Ideally, yes...
Unfortunately, the people who don't give a damn about DRM, which is a staggering majority, don't generally care what the people who loathe DRM think about it, even if it's only because they aren't technically competent enough to understand all of the ramifications... and trying to explain it to them is not terribly unlike trying to educate a dead tree on the merits of your political views. So that' s the flaw in your otherwise very reasonable-sounding plan.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
As I posted (with supporting links) in another comment: The reason EA is giving for his departure is he's responsible for their performance being about $100 million short of what they expected. A successful game launch like Skyrim (at 3.3 million copies) earned $450 million dollars, so if SimCity sold 1.1 million at launch and this was immediately followed by Amazon pulling the game from sale and even once it was back, doing things like temporarily discounting the game to $46 bucks.. then sales are likely bad enough that they're losing more than $100 million from where they expected to be on this one game alone.
Unless you were sitting on the phones and emails while the discussions were going on, you have absolutely no proof of the real reason he was fired. Everything coming from him and the company is PR. Conjecture that he had to leave due to SimCity is just as valid as conjecture that he left due to poor financial performance. Or it could be some combination of the two. Or something wholly unrelated.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
What this means is that if there is ever an earthquake in California that exceeds more than $5 Billion in insurance payments, Berkshire Hathaway is on the hook for any payments exceeding that amount. AFAIK he has no upper ceiling on his liability. If the big one hit southern California it's conceivable that his entire company would go bankrupt backstopping the insurance market.
That sounds like a large earthquake would be a humanitarian disaster followed by a financial disaster. Someone will have to absorb the amount not paid out in case of a bankruptcy. Whether it's the insurance companies, the citizens of California or the government, it's going to be painful, since they will all be short in cash after a large earthquake.
at this point you know you are going to be treated badly. Don't buy ea games.
diablo 3 release was just as bad, I spent a month trying to get a refund with no luck. I dont know why more people are not still bitching about them as well to be honest. I saw sim having a problem, so i waited and im glad i did.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
I for one say good. The last good EA game I can think of was tony hawk 2
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
On Glassdoor, his 59 percent rating was 9 points below the average
Someone can explain me this sentence? Visiting glassdoor web site does not enlighten me about this 59% rating
Given Berkshire's net worth that would be one hell of an earthquake. At current value that would mean about 250 billion + 5 billion for the insurance liability. So a total of 255 billion in damage to private property (public infrastructure is backed by the government). Hurricane Sandy did a tremendous amount of damage at about $70 billion (I think that includes public infrastructure). So you would need the equivalent of about 3.5 times the damage of Sandy only to buildings and personal property (land value isn't insured). Probably the total destruction of the entire LA valley to achieve that level of damage.
I don't think it's very likely an earthquake could generate that level of damage that it would ever exceed that figure just because it's such a large number. I mean seriously could you conceive an earthquake that destroyed every single human made structure within the entire area between Mission Viejo to Bakersfield? God knows I can't, especially considering Northridge (a 7.1 quake) did about 25 billion in damage (where more than half that cost was public infrastructure that failed). You'd need a 9.5 at more than 5 minutes long to even get close to that kind of damage in earthquake insured private property and I don't think the san andreas can generate that kind of motion. (Keep in mind not everyone has earthquake insurance)
TL;DR - seriously, he makes three points:
1). You can't estimate loss of digital wares like you can with physical inventory. Thus a pirated game may not be a lost sale
2.) DRM doesn't prevent this "loss" anyway so it's not worth putting resourced into.
3.) Ill will from customers will damage your sales more than piracy, so don't piss off customers.
He repeats these same points about 10 times each.
It's not a scam. Just got an Origin popup and was able to pick my free game, were able to choose from multiple options; ie NFS most wanted, BF3, MOHA, Dead space 3, Mass Effect 3 and some Bejeweled thing.
Get rid of management that spends their time stepping over dollars to pick up pennies.
With a big name like Simcity, it could have turned around the company quite a bit I think.
This is the sig that says NI (again)
Been playing Battlefield 3 every night for the past month or so. Its alright I guess. Setting up Origin sucked. But once running it was fine. meh
Because Diablo 3 is old news - it was released last year.
And that Activision are just as money grubbing, but have "better PR" and have acquired many "likes" through acquisitions like Blizzard and exclusivity of developers like Bungie.
If Bungie can get Destiny out within the year, it'll probably do well. If not, it'll be a horrendous mess of nickle and diming and DRM in attempts to monetize the heck out of it and capitalize on all that goodwill Bungie has. They have 10 years to do so, after all.
SimCity was an epic fail for a game release and there is no way a CEO of a company failing this hard should be allowed to continue at this company.
But this should be just the first of many firings or leavings that this company should expect.
Bottom line is, any new CEO stepping in needs to end the bullshit of imposing always on and stupid DRM schemes, accept that some percentage of content will be stolen, but if you focus on creating good compelling games and offer them at prices people find affordable and high value then you will get more people interested in paying for content rather then stealing it.
SimCity is a beloved game ruined by corporate greed. EA has ruined more games in this way and need to re-evaluate the point of being a game distributor if gamers just find their products repugnant.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Who needs EA when there is crowdfunding? The good people left long ago, and are making strong comebacks on their own, even banding together like they used to without answering to idiots.
Artix
Your Linux, your init.