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EA CEO John Riccitiello Steps Down
- elorant 14y agoCould this be linked to the SimCity recent clusterfuck?
- jjcm 14y agoIt very well could be a PR move to try and recover from that, though I doubt he was the main reason it happened. I think more than likely they're just switching figureheads and using the CEO swap as a scapegoat. I doubt they'll change direction as they're still making money.
- yuhong 14y agoI think the board of directors was on the right track: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5352969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5352969
- dagw 14y agoYou mean the clusterfuck that's sold over a million copies so far, a mere two weeks after launch?
- skore 14y agoI honestly don't know: Is a million copies a lot? I faintly recall other games selling multiple times that on launch.
- xionon 14y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_PC_video_games http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_PC_video_g... 1 million is very good, but not record-breaking. 1 million is very, very good if you consider SimCity and city-building games somewhat niche compared to games like Battlefield.
- gamble 14y agoFor a PC game, it's pretty good. Not blowing the doors off, but multiple times what a typical multiplatform PC port would do.
- newishuser 14y agoThat's what makes it a clusterfuck. If they had sold just 10 copies in would have been a loosely associated fuck.
- pixl97 14y agoHow many of those million copies were sold before the launch (pre-orders)? Also, the current game is not being sold on it's own merit. If we'd never heard of SimCity before this game would not have sold 1M copies. It's because the nostalgia that many people have had playing the different city games from the mid '90s that's carried the current game so far.
- niggler 14y agoI'm surprised it didnt happen sooner. During his tenure the stock price fell from over 60 to today's close of 18.71
- loganfrederick 14y agoIn his defense, he took over in 2007 right before the "financial crisis". Every other stock took a beating, and the gaming sector took a beating in the markets. They still have positive earnings. A lot of that price decline was out of his hands.
- niggler 14y agoContrast that with another gaming company, Activision-Blizzard, which has fared incredibly well during the turmoil since 2007 (and has paid significant dividends during that time)
- protomyth 14y agoI remember from a lecture at Gen-Con in the 90's that books and games do better during a financial crisis because they are more entertainment for the dollar. Maybe $60 video games don't follow the model.
- gamble 14y agoThat was a popular theory until 2008, when the industry was harshly disabused. I think it held so long as gaming was still expanding into the mainstream, but since the Wii/360/PS3 came out console gaming, at least, has been a saturated market.
- hakanderyal 14y agoSome insider information on this would be nice also.
- zaidf 14y agoWhy is every TC story taking me to a list of stories instead of the story itself?
- saraid216 14y agoNot happening for me. Browser extension, maybe?
- cadetzero 14y agoThank goodness. Maybe - MAYBE - this could give EA a breath of fresh air. So many pieces of AAA IP have been squandered...
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- OGinparadise 14y agoMy guess is that he left "to spend more time with his family," like http://www.komonews.com/news/tech/Groupon-CEO-leaves-To-spend-time-with-family-Just-kidding-I-was-fired-194062411.html http://www.komonews.com/news/tech/Groupon-CEO-leaves-To-spen...
- joering2 14y agowhats the difference between steeping down and being fired? Seriously asking..
- fusiongyro 14y agoIf you step down, you save face. If you're fired, the company saves face.
- weego 14y agoThough sometimes firing leads to the "Chaos at the top at Company X" which shareholders really don't like. Resigning is usually win/win at CEO level.
- jusben1369 14y agoNobody gets fired unless it's super ugly. It would have been clear that should they have another miss he'd be expected to fall on the sword.
- benjarrell 14y agoSadly, I've seen people get fired to cover for CEO mistakes.
- cookiecaper 14y agoBy nobody I think he meant "nobody at C-level". Normal people get fired all the time, but if a company fires a C-level instead of giving him a chance to turn in his resignation, it's pretty much saying "this guy is completely unfit and horrific, do NOT hire him". If a normal person gets fired, it's usually for something normal and is not necessarily an attempt to destroy that person's future.
- lobster45 14y agoEA is a publicly traded company that answers to shareholders only. Profits is the only thing that matters. That is why they are into cranking out sequels, loading up on dlc as well as all the other "profit generating" things. They are not out there for the benefits of gamers.
- darkchasma 14y agoI feel that you can offer customers a great experience and make a profit. I feel this way about all my Apple products, and I don't care about a few dollars of 'Apple Tax'. I would pay $100 for a BioWare game if it was of the quality they had before being bought out by EA.
- lobster45 14y agoYou would pay $100 for a BioWare game, but how many other people would?
- effbott 14y agoThat's a nice theory but EA's stock has been stagnant since 2009... smart investors really don't care about EA (or any other gaming company for that matter).
- huherto 14y agoThe objective of a company is to obtain profits in the present and in the future. If they don't care about customers, they sacrifice future profits.
- josh2600 14y agoLooks like he finally grew a pair of balls. All kidding aside, John is one of the Co-Founders of Elevation partners, and so I doubt he was forced out in any way. He's got some serious clout, and he's been at or near the head of EA since 1997. That being said, EA has become a real tyrannical monstrosity in recent years; I'd welcome some change. Maybe get back to a little more of something like this: http://codinghorror.typepad.com/.a/6a0120a85dcdae970b0128776fffc6970c-pi http://codinghorror.typepad.com/.a/6a0120a85dcdae970b0128776...
- potatolicious 14y agoThe disappointing thing is that EA did go through a periodo f promising change - one that the free market rejected. This would be about 2008-ish - EA invested heavily in new franchises, or different takes on existing ones. Dead Space, Mirror's Edge, Battlefield: Bad Company (a huge departure from the Battlefield norm), etc. None of which sold particularly well, and pretty much Dead Space is the only one that lived on as a franchise. The market voted with their wallets for more sequelitis.
- tlogan 14y agoNot sure about transformation - I never saw anything good in their books not in plans. My understanding that only reason why EA stock up last 3 months is because it is heavily shorted stock.
- engtech 14y agoThis is a fairly good account covering the points on the EA/Maxis SimCity 2013 bad launch. http://kotaku.com/5991077/your-complete-guide-to-the-simcity-disaster http://kotaku.com/5991077/your-complete-guide-to-the-simcity... The bad PR move imo is that the company stated that the game requires "online access to servers for cloud calculations", but users have found a single line of code that when removed allows the game to work in offline play because it disabled the connection check every 20 minutes. http://kotaku.com/5990997/coders-discover-20+minute-offline-timeout-in-simcity http://kotaku.com/5990997/coders-discover-20+minute-offline-... But in general, EA is reviled for taking good IP/brands and killing them. Here's a letter that was on reddit from an internal employee to the EA management: http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/19xb2m/a_letter_from_an_ea_employee_to_executives/c8sbzg3 http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/19xb2m/a_letter_from...
- hkmurakami 14y agoSo according to the articles posted in the parent post, removing line 22 here [1] will enable offline play. I'm not literate at all about the state in which production code gets shipped to the end user, but I would have expected this level of code to have been in binary form. Could someone shed some light on this? [1] http://pastebin.com/8NR1EdkN http://pastebin.com/8NR1EdkN
- wskinner 14y agoThis appears to be javascript. Lots of games use scripting languages for certain components. However, it is pretty surprising that they would implement a supposed "security" feature in such a way.
- seanalltogether 14y agoThats the thing, its not a security feature at all, all you're doing by disabling that feature is extending the length of time you can play before checking in with the server, but if you quit the game without reconnecting you will still lose everything. Maxis must've decided that 20 minutes was the threshold before people would be really pissed that they might lose their progress.
- Kylekramer 14y agoAny attempt to link to this to SimCity would be a severe case of trying to fit a simple solution to something much more complex. You don't push out a guy who has been a top guy there for 15 years over that. Especially since people having been bitching about EA (Origin, DRM, etc.) for years.
- newishuser 14y agoI think you mean any attempt to say he got push out solely because of the SimCity fiasco... It's perfectly reasonable to wonder as to whether or not the SimCity launch had an effect on his position at EA.
- avolcano 14y agoRiccitiello's actually had a rocky tenure, with quite a few new IPs "failing" under his watch. Of course, remember, this is EA - to them, Dead Space, the most popular survival horror franchise of the last five years, underperformed. Still, I doubt this has much at all to do with SimCity. If it does, it has more to do with its low MetaCritic score than actual user complaints.
- badloginagain 14y agoIt wouldn't be based too much on user complaints or metacritic scores for SimCity or any other game really. Underperforming revenue is likely the largest factor in Riccitello's departure. There has been a string of quarters hitting below/low on their outlook. To Riccitello's credit, EA was in a terrible position pre-recession. A bad business plan, an inflated stock price and a bloated portfolio. JR had to make some brutal choices during the recession and has turned EA into a leaner beast, banking on online distribution and focusing on a smaller, higher quality portfolio. And while the big picture of where he took EA is a logical one, I assume that the missed revenue from underperforming titles is the biggest factor in him stepping down. Of course, this is all conjecture on my part.
- phaus 14y ago
- tailrecursion 14y agoWithout being surprised I'm a little curious about the statement that the game required access to the server, in order to run. I'm curious how statements like that get made, because it seems like it's just a matter of time before the truth -- which is that the game didn't require a server -- is discovered. The letter that Engtech linked to puts the responsibility where it ultimately needs to rest. The PR folks are letting the other parts of the company down, and if that's because of hiring mistakes or because the culture doesn't do an effective job reminding PR critters not to lie too much, either way it's the executives who made a mistake. Electronic Arts has become a hated entity, just hated, and part of that I think comes from the controversy-making of the news machine. But part of it comes from nearly unexplainable statements, by people who I guess just learned the wrong life lessons, people who are clearly hiring mistakes.
- far33d 14y agoI predict that the new CEO will be a current or former exec at Zynga - likely one of the execs that were "poached" from EA a few years ago.
- kevinconroy 14y ago"We won't remove the DRM, but we will remove our CEO." - EA
- Finster 14y agoI like the part where he takes responsibility for EA's woes, as if there wasn't a more systemic issue or anything.
- freehunter 14y agoThat's what a CEO does. A CEO sets the direction of the company. If that direction is leading them astray, it's the CEO's fault, no matter who else is to blame. Systemic issues within the company are a CEO's problem.
- DigitalSea 14y agoGood on him for taking accountability and leaving. Most CEO's run companies into the ground because they don't want to relinquish the power they have or acknowledge they have screwed up. People will be quick to draw a conclusion to his resignation and the lacklustre debut of Simcity, but a guy who has been at the top for over a decade doesn't just quit over one fiasco. This is a guy who realises his direction of a company hasn't led it to the holy promise land of profitability and he's stepping down to give someone else a shot, this guy deserves some respect for that. Can we stop talking about Simcity now?
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- hobb0001 14y ago> A source who worked closely with Riccitiello ... said "The truth is that the game industry continues to pivot very rapidly. EA is in a good place but it requires a lot of energy and laser focus... He's been pivoting the company hard for many years, but the industry keeps pivoting faster." I call BS on techcrunch. There is no "source". That was a Silicon Valley buzzword generator.
- S_A_P 14y agoMaybe this has little to do with SimCity. Obviously a CEO has very little involvement from a technical standpoint. The sim city issues could have caused some political pressure on him for several reasons: 1) If this happened before with Diablo 3 then why was there no lesson learned that prevented this from happening this time around. 2) When Amazon temporarily stops selling your game, the perception of that is bad. Board members get antsy when the worlds largest online retailer pulls the plug.