EA CEO Wants Its Games to Fail For the "Right Reasons"

[Stevepinto3]

EA this is not some kind of mystery. Stop homogenizing all of your games to be Call of Duty (or Gears of War, or Skyrim, or Assassin's Creed, or GTA, or whatever popular series you're trying to imitate), no day 1 DLC, and for the love of god no crap DRM disguised as a "service".

"a culture of innovation inside the company that actually starts a lot more stuff but at the same time kills a bunch more stuff before it gets to market so that we can give ourselves more short-term goals to get to that next innovative product."

But how will that inspire immersive creativity without innovating against the grain of outside-the-box thinking that will be fostered by the influx of new ideas and mechanisms being crowd-sourced by....

Woah sorry. Got caught in a buzzword loop for a sec there.

 

[ScrabbitRabbit]

Also, you can still buy retail, physical copies of Skyrim or Dawn of War and play them without having to install Steam.

You literally couldn't be more wrong. Half-Life 2 required a Steam account to install the game if you bought it at retail back in 2004. All Valve games do.

I buy retail PC games almost exclusively and I still have over 100 games on Steam. You have no choice but to install it and it's all because Valve made it a mandatory requirement for the biggest PC release of the year back in 2004.

No idea about Dawn of War, but I bought Skyrim at retail and it required Steam.

 

[MCerberus]

This is something that management needs to learn. The people actually making the products understand this very well. It's the people lording over them that don't and that is a tragedy.

Once again, this line of thinking goes against modern, smart project management theory. The idea that one of the triple constraints should be abandoned is laughable, and there are entire libraries written about working on all three. Hell, risk management 101 accomplishes this. This says nothing about proper six-sigma or Kai-zen.

 

[Fox12]

We've heard this tune before. Sorry EA, talk is cheap and so am I. When you release a legitimately great game I'll pay attention. Until then...

On the bright side, Microsoft is trying REALLY hard to steal your crown.

 

[LoLife]

It all sounds to me that Andrew Wilson just wants EA's crap to smell and look like roses, while ramming it down their customers throats faster, while what he should be doing is getting EA to stop whats its been doing over the last few years and do the total opposite or he can get a ton of Jet fuel take it over to EA HQ and light a match either way the problem is solved. =)

 

[Micalas]

This is something that management needs to learn. The people actually making the products understand this very well. It's the people lording over them that don't and that is a tragedy.

Once again, this line of thinking goes against modern, smart project management theory. The idea that one of the triple constraints should be abandoned is laughable, and there are entire libraries written about working on all three. Hell, risk management 101 accomplishes this. This says nothing about proper six-sigma or Kai-zen.

Maybe I'm just jaded because I work for the US Federal Government and am a Lean Six Sigma Green Belt.

 

[MCerberus]

Maybe I'm just jaded because I work for the US Federal Government and am a Lean Six Sigma Green Belt.

See there's your problem, Sigma is a Greek letter and Kai-Zen sounds reaaaaaaaaal foreign. Or it could be because the US federal government is literally a textbook example of both departmentalism interfering with projects and executive meddling.

The most used example is the Bradley fighting vehicle.
In any case, there's a weird situation where actually following lean-six in federal governments actually gets your budget slashed instead of investing into improvements.

 

[Product Placement]

I really don't like that company, to the point that I now don't want anything to do with their product.

Point being, now that they've manged to alienate me and allot of other gamers, to the point of consciously active boycotting, this attempt of theirs to rebrand themselves is gonna be an uphill battle.

 

[gamegod25]

Hmmm this sounds familiar...oh right it was from John Riccitiello when he became CEO and we know how that went.

And while the general sentiment is good he already misses the point by thinking they can crank out high quality games quickly. That simply can't be done unless you are making very short and simple games, like most indie games. If you want a quality big budget game then you have to put lots of time into it. We all ***** about Valve and Blizzard taking forever to release their games but at least the final product is worth the wait. In short: doing a job quickly is pointless if its done poorly as a result.

As much shit as I give EA its only because I WANT to like them again. But they just keep pulling under handed shit and fuck up franchises I love so badly its impossible to feel anything but rage for them.

And considering they assassinated two of my most beloved franchises growing up (Simcity and C&C) it's going to take a loooooot on their part to mend this bridge.

 

[kwagamon]

"We need a mechanism and a process which we can get to [produce] better games more quickly,"

Better games? Yeah, I'd love to see that. When I play an EA game, it's usually satisfying but never really WOWS me.

More quickly? That, I'm incredibly skeptical of. If they want more AAA games more quickly, that's bad. If they're going to create smaller studios and just tell them "hey make a game," that's good. Small titles can be made quickly and be great, while big seem much harder. Besides, gamers actually don't forget a good series as quickly as some publishers seem to think. Look how many people are still clamoring for Half-Life 3 (and/or 2: Episode 3) all these years later. You don't NEED to make games more quickly. In fact a little slower wouldn't be a bad idea. Gives you more time to make something truly great instead of something that all I can really say is that it exists.

 

[The Enquirer]

"We need a mechanism and a process which we can get to [produce] better games more quickly," he said.

How about instead of worrying about the whole speed thing you guys first worry about making a good game. Your problem is the fact you move too fast, hence why Sim City was plagued with bugs.

Also working on how you word things wouldn't be terrible. You shouldn't "want games to fail for the right reasons", implying that you want games to fail, but you should maybe say "If a game fails we want it to be for appropriate reasons".

I want Ea to be a good company again. I really do because they have a lot of control over a lot of games that I enjoy. I've been boycotting most Ea games since shortly after Mass Effect 3 since that is when a close friend of mine's Origin account got hacked and they essentially flat out refused to help him. I'm possibly going to buy Battlefront because Star Wars Battlefront was my first FPS but I'm not going to buy it if people say its basically just battlefield with a different texture pack.

 

[Reyold]

I'd like to think he's telling the truth, but... c'mon, it's friggin' EA. Redemption isn't impossible. It's just really unlikely, given their track record

 

[Some_weirdGuy]

Tis guy sounds just like the last guy did.

"We're sorry. We'll fix it." followed by them making it worse.

Also:

"We need a mechanism and a process which we can get to [produce] better games more quickly"

My teachers back in engineering college had a saying that goes something like this....

You can make a product that covers, at most, two of the following three bases of business:
1) It's done fast
2) It's done cheap
3) It's done well

You can't have a product that does all three. So pick wisely.

haha, I was literally just about to skip past the rest of the comments to post that exact saying XD


Either way, it would be nice to think they could work something out to avoid this bad rep, I mean it's totally ridiculous they got voted worst company (speaks more poorly of gamers than of EA, 'first word problems' XD ), but they have done stuff to paint themselves as a target, and it's going to take a fair bit of effort to pull themselves out of that rut, they'll have to not just be 'ok, but markedly better than some competitor in order to divert the mud slinging ((and lets be honest, people have this need to 'blame', so the 'target' will never go away, it will just shift from one group to another))

 

[Blood Brain Barrier]

Tis guy sounds just like the last guy did.

"We're sorry. We'll fix it." followed by them making it worse.

Also:

"We need a mechanism and a process which we can get to [produce] better games more quickly"

My teachers back in engineering college had a saying that goes something like this....

You can make a product that covers, at most, two of the following three bases of business:
1) It's done fast
2) It's done cheap
3) It's done well

You can't have a product that does all three. So pick wisely.

That analogy only works if games are technical, engineering products. Are they? To an extent, but only to the same degree that novels are technical products because they must be printed and bound. EA's approach strips their games of artistry, or at least their potential for a higher level of artistry than what they are achieving.

 

[AldUK]

You know what amuses me about the whole EA relationship with gamers? The hypocrisy of it all. EA are voted 'worst in America' (twice, by the way) by the consumers. They make statements promising that they have heard and it'll all get better. The community lambast them on public forums and pat each other on the back while rolling their eyes.

Then guess what happens? You all go out and buy their damn games.

Seriously, Sim City broke records for sales DESPITE the controversy. Dragon Age sells millions, Mass Effect is a goldmine for EA and all people do is complain about it. Their annual sports games keep being made because they sell.

If you all hate the company so much, stop bloody funding their shit.

 

[VoidWanderer]

I really don,t get the whole worst company in America thing... yeah EA is far to being the ebst company around.. but the worst? really?

Well the majority of the people who voted were the thousands of players who got screwed by Maxis (not EA like most believed), not say, the hundreds of families thrown out of their homes, because America wants bigger guns and bigger explosives, than say, an economy that works

 

[VoidWanderer]

You know what amuses me about the whole EA relationship with gamers? The hypocrisy of it all. EA are voted 'worst in America' (twice, by the way) by the consumers. They make statements promising that they have heard and it'll all get better. The community lambast them on public forums and pat each other on the back while rolling their eyes.

Then guess what happens? You all go out and buy their damn games.

Seriously, Sim City broke records for sales DESPITE the controversy. Dragon Age sells millions, Mass Effect is a goldmine for EA and all people do is complain about it. Their annual sports games keep being made because they sell.

If you all hate the company so much, stop bloody funding their shit.

Well I have recently developed this level of anger at a company/person.

George Lucas has said that the Force is Light and Dark Side, and people who believe in the Gray part of it are kidding themselves, so I will not buy ANYTHING for this franchise until George manages to get his head of his Dark Side and sees the Light

 

[BrownGaijin]

"There are lots of really big public companies that make a lot of money that are loved by their consumers," he said. "That's because the consumers feel like they get value from that company in the investment in their dollars [and] time."

As I read this, I imagined the biggest image of Nicolas cage going "No Really?" just hovering over the sky. You feel athat your customers are upset because they're feel like they're not getting their money's worth? Congratulations new CEO, you passed business 101. Here's a sticker. What's that? You wanted a cookie? Sorry but the last CEO stole them all... from orphans... who were puppies.

 

[OldFogeyGamer]

Call me cynical, but even if EA improved their customer support, got rid of Origin (yes, it's like Steam, I already have Steam, I don't want yet another Steam clone or go revisit Steam's growing pains AGAIN), murdered any employee who so much as whispered "always online", and encouraged new IPs, it's not going to change why they're a bad publisher.

They chase trends and make cookie cutter games, that's what makes them profitable, they're not going to change that because plenty of causal gamers will continue buying their products. If anything improving everything else about the company will just create a greater financial motivation NOT to threaten their profit model.