Any 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.
Yes, it's true that firings and comings and goings are not caused by just singular events and milestones. But something like the SimCity fiasco provides enough political cover for executives to be pushed out. Riccitiello may have already been disliked by some in the company, but otherwise had enough support that it would've been difficult to uproot him. With the SimCity problem, there's enough "Well, that was a screwup" grumbling going on to make it an easier push.
Maybe it's not all due to SimCity, but that it was the final nail in the coffin?
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.
I 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.
It 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.
EA's business plan has been the same since the early 90s.
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.
There have been numerous occasions where the features of a game don't match what has been printed on the back of the box.
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.
Could you explain to me why the SimCity launch was any worse than Diablo 3? Seems like apart from initial instability and some people making a lot of noise the resulting sales numbers were still fine.
I really doubt Simcity has anything to do with it. The real problem is that EA's stock took a big hit in '08, and has been stagnant since. Many of R's big initiatives, like the new-IP push, the studio acquisitions, and TOR have not paid dividends. Frankly, I'm surprised that he's lasted this long.
Exactly: but Simcity did not help. I think board members are like: "How did you even manage to screw up this? The game had good reviews and would help us repair our image - but it actually ended up as a disaster?"
I wouldn't be surprised if it affected the timing of his announcement - get all the bad news out at once and wipe the slate clean - bit it's been clear for some time that R. was in trouble if EA's financial situation didn't turn around soon. At this point it's pretty much guaranteed that the next step will be either a sale or severe cuts, likely planned out over the next couple of months so that they can be announced when their next earnings report is due. R. may just not have wanted to play the axe man.
I think I remember John promising not to repeat the Spore DRM debacle in one of those townhall meetings. He was there to change the EA-is-the-devil's-armpit image and the SimCity PR disaster is just another example of his failure.
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.
From what most game devs seem to say, most of the industry revolves around finding naive young developers who learned to program because they loved video games, hiring them on salary without explaining that they will work 80-100 hours per week (or promising overtime that you never intend to pay), and then spending the duration of the project reminding them how worthless they are and that there are a dozen CS grads who would love to take their places. Finally, having lost the will to live, they quit the business and settle down into nice, stress-free .NET jobs, where they will spend the next several years trying to regain faith in humanity.
I'd venture to say that it isn't caused by the SimCity fiasco, but could be used as a, "Hey guys we are trying to fix this, see?" Kind of move on EA's part. All I know for sure is there are too many people happy about this for it to not be related at all. (Not trying to say there's causation, just correlation.)
Yeah there is probably more to it than Sim City. Too bad EA turned into such a despicable company - the early days with the founder, Trip Hawkins, were a very different story. EA at its beginning was considering creators and developers as artists and treated them like rock stars. Those days are long gone.
While this is true, at the same time the article points out another external factor of games shifting to mobile and at the same time completely ignores the fact that EA is just utterly disconnected from what the consumer market actually wants.
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.
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.
As far as I can tell, this idea is popular but it is flat-out wrong. I seriously don't understand how this criticism makes any sense.
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.
> 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 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.
It has been established that the only "calculation" the server does inform other cities of your available resources in your unopened, frozen city. Additionally, it handles game saves. All city simulation is handled client side.
So to run an offline region you'd need to engineer a local save, and then figure out a way to determine the available resources in these locally saved cities. Something pretty advanced, like a 1kb CSV might be able to handle it.
Thanks for explaining this. So the real issue isn't that EA officials have lied about online-only, it is that EA misleads their customers on the level of difficulty. Saying the game is engineered from the ground up for online play suggests some complexity at the server level which simply doesn't exist.
People with well-examined opinions aren't upset that EA servers don't run the city-level simulation. They are upset at how simple it would be to give users region simulation on their local PC, a server app so users can run their own, or a play-by-email implementation.
I find it ironic that the DRM is pushing me to wait until the game is cracked and client-side regions are possible. I was actually happy to buy SimCity, but I want have my saves and run regions offline. Pretty hilarious.
So what? It's obvious that someone can reimplement the server logic. This is how we've worked around multiplayer DRM forever. Maxis didn't say "we are incapable of writing this code to run on a local client", they just said "we wrote this code to run on our cloud infrastructure, because it's a buzzword that might get someone stupid to care about us, and because it has a convenient side effect of making piracy more difficult". Of course they could have written the code to run client-side, or to run on independent servers, or whatever.
So 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?
JavaScript doesn't get compiled into binary. The human readable source code file just gets processed directly by an engine that executes each command. You're right though, the fact that this is in a form that's so easy to read is extremely surprising.
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.
> 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.
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.
This 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.
Thats 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.
The Glassbox engine was designed to be easily moddable. The problem is the games 'online' nature leads EA to ban people from making mods to keep people from cheating. There was a huge disconnect in the grand vision somewhere.
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.
The 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.
When you are dealing with AAA budgets, anything less than 3M copies is likely a loss, and you usually have to venture into 5M copies to start actually making money, generating value and creating confidence in the brand / IP.
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.
Does it matter? If their production costs are too high, they should find better ways of controlling costs; a game that sells 2.5 million copies is still a game that the market has validated.
> If their production costs are too high, they should find better ways of controlling costs;
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.
The point is that if 2.5 million people are willing to buy the game, the demand side of the equation is a settled one, and it's up to the supplier to find a way to turn that demand into a viable profit. If EA can't, then it's a problem with their own operations, not a problem with the product.
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.
Not 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.
> 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.
It 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.
How 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.
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.
In 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.
Contrast 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)
I 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.
That 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.
Maybe 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.
Without 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.
That'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.
EA 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.
I 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.
That'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).
Good 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.
By 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.
Firing would have been a deliberate attempt on EA's part to tarnish his career. Stepping down is the nice corporate way of saying "You're a great guy but things just aren't working out."
