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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
"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.
Prepare for some incoming.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
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
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