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.
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.
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.
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.