EA CEO John Riccitiello Steps Down
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
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.
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.
Step 1: Forcibly sodomize both customers and dev studios.
Step 2: ?????
Step 3: Profit.
In all seriousness though, I think that to make the company leaner, they were forced to abandon many franchises and platforms that they found to be unprofitable. The shitty part about this, is that if the business side of EA didn't insist on ruining the majority of the games that EA makes, many of them would have actually had a chance to stay profitable.
Also, look at the Sim City fiasco. The people who purchased it couldn't even play the game in many cases, because they weren't able to connect to the authentication servers.
Stay classy.
That's a pretty small sample set right there.
Still, bit strange that this has anything to do with his performance. Although i don't like what EA has become, it's a much more profitable company than before he took the reigns.
Also, his worst nightmare was having another one of those ea-spouse letter pop out; not dissimilar from the anonymous self-bashing letter we saw last week.
I guess he's Being Accountable for his failed promises.
EDIT: Never mind, found it in another thread.
The fact is that what the game market needs is the flexibility to play games how, when and where they want - this is the point of games - to be an enjoyable and accessible escape into their stories.
By consistently blocking users from being able to access the imagination time that games provide shows that you don't understand the intrinsic value that games provide to people.
In addition to Origin there's Bullfrog, Westwood, Mythic, Jane's Flight Sims,Sports games for the PC.
There are many more that are dead and or dying at the hands of EA, some of them just don't know it yet.
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-...
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...
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?
Normally what's done with script languages like JavaScript is to obfuscate the file by processing it with a tool that would rename everything to be meaningless, and change spacing, line breaks, etc in a way that is still executable, but overwhelmingly tedious/difficult for any human to read and understand.
Did they really ship the game with such open sourced code? For a company so concerned about preventing piracy, I find that pretty hard to believe. It's like they didn't even try.
Well, it can. V8 and other Javascript engines do Just-In-Time (JIT) binary compilation, meaning that they start by interpreting and executing each line of code as they read it, but when they see a function getting executed a lot, they convert just that function to native machine code as a performance optimization for the next time it gets called.
And, because this does happen, you can ship compiled Javascript--by dumping the memory-image of the Javascript interpreter after running it for a while (JITed routines and all) and then reloading it on the client end.
node-webkit (an application framework similar to the one EA/Maxis uses for SimCity's UI) has a good example of this concept in action: https://github.com/rogerwang/node-webkit/wiki/Protect-JavaSc...
Technically V8 does not have an interpreter pass at all. It always JITs to machine code. It does have two compilers though: a fast JIT and a slow JIT. The fast one gets code running as quickly as possible so your app starts fast, but doesn't generate optimal code. The slow JIT kicks in for hot code and spends more timing compiling it to something that will run faster.
The dart guys are always talking about how long it takes to parse js. it's not a huge win, but still quicker doing the parsing up front.
The first Kotaku article you link quotes Maxis general manager Bradshaw: "GlassBox works by attributing portions of the computing to EA servers (the cloud) and some on the player's local computer." She was speaking in the context of online play and region play. There is a bit of ambiguity here, but suffice to say given the context and a modicum of common sense that the servers run the region-level simulation. Nobody has ever presented a single shred of evidence to refute that claim. The servers run the region-level simulation.
That is why the region level simulation is not playable in offline play. Because the game isn't playable offline. Because the servers run calculations.
I was upset that I couldn't play Sim City when it came out, and I am still upset with continuing region sync issues. The pathfinding code for agents (vehicles and utilities) is abysmal. There are lots of valid reasons to dislike this game. But misrepresenting online-only play isn't among the things EA did wrong.
EA built Sim City around region play and they told the truth about that. They say it doesn't work if you're not connected to the region, and when some folks show that, indeed, the region sim doesn't work when you disconnect from the internet, it's total bullshit to construe this as evidence that EA lied about whether it works offline. It doesn't.
Are people simply upset that EA won't make some kind of boneheaded mea culpa? "We built the game around online-only region play as cynical ploy to prevent piracy." Yeah right.
I guarantee you that within a couple weeks, someone will have reverse-engineered the server responses to fake that bit client side. The data it sends and the responses are pretty much just integers.
If modders can do it, there's no reason why the authors couldn't.
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/6a0120a85dcdae970b0128776...
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.
Mirror's Edge sold more than two million copies according to an EA court document released October 2010.
BF:BC has sold over 2.5 million copies according to VGChartz.
BF:BC2 has sold nearly four million copies. Oh, and it's a sequel to BF:BC, so that franchise lives on.
And these are games that the free market rejected?
They do: they find other games that are more profitable to make.
> a game that sells 2.5 million copies is still a game that the market has validated.
Corporations don't exist to be "validated" in some nebulous. They have to make money. I could get the market to wildly validate any product: give it away for free, or, hell, pay people to use it.
That unfortunately doesn't make for a successful business.
If someone else can produce a title that satisfies the demonstrated market demand for city-simulation games by producing one that is profitable, then they'll win and EA will lose.
The AAA arms race has destroyed many studios, IPs and careers. 10 years ago, it used to be that one single hit could pay off your other 9 underperforming titles. With budgets going up 10x and top sales going up at best 2x, that balance can't hold and you have to be ruthless killing underperformers. I'm not a fan of Bobby Kotick (I was part of one of his layoffs!), but look at how he has led Activision as a company.
I call BS on techcrunch. There is no "source". That was a Silicon Valley buzzword generator.
I faintly recall other games selling multiple times that on launch.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Can we stop talking about Simcity now?