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EA CEO's Departure Might Be Good For the Company

Posted by Soulskill on from the profit-chasing-behavior-backfires dept.

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.

9 of 84 comments (clear)

  1. definition of "needs" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    >>if you're going to launch a popular title that needs to be constantly connected to online servers

    It all comes down to "needs"

  2. Pretty sure he left because of... by ASimPerson · · Score: 3, Informative

    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
  3. I'm a developer in Vancouver... by ADRA · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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!
    1. Re:I'm a developer in Vancouver... by SpaceMonkies · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Back in 2004 Electronic Arts was criticized for employees working extraordinarily long hours—up to 100 hours per week—and not just at "crunch" times leading up to the scheduled releases of products. The publication of the EA Spouse blog, with criticisms such as "The current mandatory hours are 9 a.m. to 10 p.m.—seven days a week—with the occasional Saturday evening off for good behavior (at 6:30 p.m.)". The company has since settled a class action lawsuit brought by game artists to compensate for unpaid overtime. The class was awarded US$15.6 million. As a result, many of the lower-level developers (artists, programmers, producers, and designers) are now working at an hourly rate. A similar suit brought by programmers was settled for US$14.9 million.

    2. Re:I'm a developer in Vancouver... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Any company where developers work those kinds of hours regularly is doing it wrong. I would never consider a job where I constantly work 60 hours per week a "comfortable gig". If your project planning is done properly and resources allocated accordingly, a normal work week should suffice. Of course there are companies where that planning fails at some level, but if that happens regularly those companies aren't likely to be able to stay in business anyway.

    3. Re:I'm a developer in Vancouver... by barc0001 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      60 hours a week is NOT a "comfortable gig" unless you're fresh out of uni with no appreciable outside life. I did that for almost 10 years and looking back on it can't believe I did it as long as I did. There are plenty of tech companies around that "get it" and don't squeeze every last waking minute out of their people. One thing I definitely noticed was that the longer you make people work, the less work/hour they did since they were planning to be there for 12 hours a day anyway. Or if they were being pushed hard during those 12 hours, toward the end of the week they started to make costly mistakes that took hours to find and correct. In both cases the company was making minimal gains at large personal cost to the employees.

  4. come on guys can't we remove the BS before posting by bloodhawk · · Score: 4, Interesting

    "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.

  5. I wouldn't get my hopes up... by Lendrick · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  6. Yeah - more like by fyngyrz · · Score: 3, Funny

    if you're going to launch a popular title that PRETENDS to need to be constantly connected to online servers

    ...and you get caught

    Prepare for some incoming.

    --
    I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.