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John Riccitiello steps down as CEO of Electronic Arts. [Resignation/Farewell Letters]

CTLance

Member
That is preeeetty big news. Can't believe I only stumble upon it now.

Oh well. I'm pretty sure nothing will change. The king is dead, long live the king!
 
Only the Dynamic Duo of Cliffy and Arthur can save EA now.

CFi0TLw.jpg
 

Derrick01

Banned
Yea EA is not going to go in any direction people on this board are going to celebrate... I'm surprised at all the people happy here, you don't know what you're in for haha

Everyone knows what's going to happen but I don't see why we can't celebrate probably the most hated man in the industry leaving.
 
I don't know if this is means a better or worse future, I don't know if this will change EA or not, but I truly hope for a return to shape.


I would love to finally see Dante's Purgatory -a sequel to Dante's Inferno- but this time without being a God of War knock off, and being different, there is potential there, and I don't think EA got any other hack n slash titles, right ?!


I would also love to see Dead Space returning to form, focusing more and more on Survival Horror rather than Action Horror, maybe Dead Space will be saved at last.


I wonder if the costumer treatment will change, cause this is a must.
 

jcm

Member
WTH am I reading?
You think making a facebook version of Sim city and turning that into a retail PC game at the last minute is "improving the quality of the product"? Dead "microtransaction" Space 3 was too?
Seriously WTH!
At least ATVI (aside from Diablo III) didn't take a series people were absolutely in love with for the last 20 years and turn it into a shit pile of smoldering puke.
Shitting on ATVI for milking stuffs to death and praising EA for releasing new IP (with shit like Dante's "GodofWar" Inferno in their portfolio to boot!) takes some kind of special glasses you only see in this medium.

1. Focusing on quality doesn't mean you will like everything.
2. Focusing on quality doesn't mean that they will always succeed.
3. Dante's "GodofWar" Inferno is in fact new IP, and ATVI does in fact milk stuff to death. No special glasses need to see both those facts.
 

Kadayi

Banned
Long overdue. He bet large on TOR and BF3 and neither really panned out for him. I was surprised he lasted this long.

Very interested to see who gets appointed, however I suspect there will likely be a considerable degree of rationalization by whomever is in charge in order to reduce overheads. I suspect we'll see a few studios get thrown under the bus and maybe some projects cancelled whilst they refocus. I suspect there will be an aggressive campaign to combat a lot of the negative publicity they've garnered of late.
 
I'm scared of what may come next. I think Riccitiello's heart as in the right place when he began his tenure at EA, but his choices didn't really pan out.
 

jcm

Member
Long overdue. He bet large on TOR and BF3 and neither really panned out for him. I was surprised he lasted this long.

Very interested to see who gets appointed, however I suspect there will likely be a considerable degree of rationalization by whomever is in charge in order to reduce overheads. I suspect we'll see a few studios get thrown under the bus and maybe some projects cancelled whilst they refocus. I suspect there will be an aggressive campaign to combat a lot of the negative publicity they've garnered of late.

BF3 didn't pan out? Last I saw it was well over 15M, maybe sneaking up on 20M. Pretty sure that TOR is what really hurt him.
 

charsace

Member
I'm scared of what may come next. I think Riccitiello's heart as in the right place when he began his tenure at EA, but his choices didn't really pan out.

He was aiming for the hardcore at first, and that tanked the company. I think that if things would have panned out like John was hoping for EA would still be putting out new IP's and wouldn't be as anti-consumer as they are now.
 
I'm pretty sure that Pachter twitter was warming up to the replacement, nothing more. It was political.

re: the resignation...he did good, and he did not so good. IMO it was TOR that hurt 'em, but it makes me think that I should build a game studio, flood games, and get sold to EA.
 

Aaron

Member
He was aiming for the hardcore at first, and that tanked the company. I think that if things would have panned out like John was hoping for EA would still be putting out new IP's and wouldn't be as anti-consumer as they are now.
As it's been mentioned before, no he didn't. Nearly all of the new IP games were in production before he took over as CEO. I think even Mass Effect and Dragon Age were in production before Bioware formed under Elevation Partners. Instead, he invested heavily in social games, which didn't really pan out, and two expensive MMOs that didn't pan out either. The only real successes under his watch were continuing franchises. Bringing back SSX and Medal of Honor both flopped.
 

charsace

Member
As it's been mentioned before, no he didn't. Nearly all of the new IP games were in production before he took over as CEO. I think even Mass Effect and Dragon Age were in production before Bioware formed under Elevation Partners. Instead, he invested heavily in social games, which didn't really pan out, and two expensive MMOs that didn't pan out either. The only real successes under his watch were continuing franchises. Bringing back SSX and Medal of Honor both flopped.

I could have sworn that he did interviews where he was talking about doing new ips at EA. Then the company tanked and he changed his tune.
 
to be fair to Pachter the stock market behaves irrationally. So it's probably a good time to buy EA stock. Then you dump it as the price goes up when they announce a new CEO.
 

izt_is

Banned
can anyone with some insight explain pachter's comments to me? Cause I honestly have no clue how the stock market really works...I thought I did but clearly I don't.
 

Mael

Member
1. Focusing on quality doesn't mean you will like everything.
2. Focusing on quality doesn't mean that they will always succeed.
3. Dante's "GodofWar" Inferno is in fact new IP, and ATVI does in fact milk stuff to death. No special glasses need to see both those facts.

1. Focusing on quality certainly doesn't mean going from Sim City 4 to the disaster that is SimCity 2013. It also doesn't mean that their Wow wannabe TOR gets to be released in the sorry shape it did.
It also doesn't mean transforming your popular games into ATM with microtransactions.
2. I'll certainly give you that.
3. When your new IP is more tired than the milked to death Guitar Hero you know something is wrong.
Might as well be happy with how MSFT handled Rare while you're at it!
 
can anyone with some insight explain pachter's comments to me? Cause I honestly have no clue how the stock market really works...I thought I did but clearly I don't.

Imagine a bunch of headless chickens running around spraying blood and shitting all over everything.
 

evangd007

Member
No, I meant they released anything on Wii?
I mean aside from Boom Blox and shitty sports games.

And OMG I agree with pachter on something!

They made that rails shooter that reviewers loved but consumers never cared about.


Now we can get good games on wii U?

Nintendo curse that's CEO ....!

Riccitiello didn't even have to make games for Nintendo to be cursed, just promise them at some point.
 

Mael

Member
Even if those risks had paid off better they'd just be milking those franchises right now.

That's pretty much what they did, I mean Dead Space is pretty much milked along with the other properties.
I have no idea why they didn't try to milk dante though.

They made that rails shooter that reviewers loved but consumers never cared about.

You mean the Dead Space game no one ever asked for that wasted Eurocom's time?
 
He was aiming for the hardcore at first, and that tanked the company. I think that if things would have panned out like John was hoping for EA would still be putting out new IP's and wouldn't be as anti-consumer as they are now.

They made the Skate games under his leadership. That makes him the best.
 

Aaron

Member
TOR was a huge risk, and a huge failure, and now all the leads associated with it are going from EA.
TOR shouldn't have been a risk. Star Wars is one of the largest franchises in the world. An MMO should have been money in the bank, but they screwed the wooki badly on that one.
 

Into

Member
Hindsight is always 20/20 as they say

But if you look at the money WoW was bringing in, and you take Bioware and slap on the popular and always relevant Star Wars intellectual property together, then you cannot really blame Riccitiello for helping green light such a project, in theory it makes perfect sense and a license to print money for years to come

If anything i blame more Bioware for that game than EA, they just did not create a compelling MMO, and lord knows (and the stats do show) that people gave that game a chance, the game it self was just not good enough.

Its not like Riccitiello green-lighted some batshit crazy 200 million dollar 3D platformer based on the ALF license.
 

ironcreed

Banned
Its not even that- Medal of Honor: Warfighter was one of the most risk averse titles you can think of and it flopped horribly.

Indeed, playing it safe and continuing to try and chase after the COD crowd is the worst strategy any publisher can employ going forward and has been for the past few years. If anything, more risks need to be taken with bold new ideas that can get people excited again for something different. Somebody needs to step up to the plate, but it sure as hell is not going to be EA. That much is pretty evident, I think.
 

Nirolak

Mrgrgr
Its not even that- Medal of Honor: Warfighter was one of the most risk averse titles you can think of and it flopped horribly.

I would say the risks he took were things like running into Steam, CoD, WoW, Zynga, and others head on with expensive projects and acquisitions.

Some of those worked out well, others not so much.

While he did turn the company around quite well financially, he also lost a lot of money on bad bets at the same time.

Having him leave now puts the new CEO in a fiscal year that should largely be a cakewalk given their line-up seems to consist of their annual sports games, EA MMA, Battlefield, Dragon Age, and Respawn's title, and thus starts them off on a good foot.
 

evangd007

Member
You mean the Dead Space game no one ever asked for that wasted Eurocom's time?

It wasn't a total waste of time. Eurocom developed a decent engine out of the deal that was later used in Goldeneye.


TOR was a huge risk, and a huge failure, and now all the leads associated with it are going from EA.

ToR was a much larger risk than it needed to be due to poor management of the budget and the project in general.
 

Derrick01

Banned
TOR was a huge risk, and a huge failure, and now all the leads associated with it are going from EA.

I guess financially it was a huge risk but to me taking the star wars IP and making a WoW clone wasn't a risk at all. I think the only thing that went wrong is it came out when people were done with WoW clones and pay to play MMOs. They simply took too long to release it.
 
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