

EA CEO John Riccitiello Steps Down - acremades
http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/18/ea-ceo-john-riccitiello-steps-down-larry-probst-becomes-executive-chairman/

======
Kylekramer
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.

~~~
newishuser
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.

~~~
avolcano
Riccitiello's actually had a rocky tenure, with quite a few new IPs "failing"
under his watch.

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.

~~~
hvs
"the most popular survival horror franchise of the last five years"

That's a pretty small sample set right there.

~~~
mpyne
Perhaps, but that's an entire console lifespan for most of the videogaming
industry's existence.

------
engtech
This is a fairly good account covering the points on the EA/Maxis SimCity 2013
bad launch.

[http://kotaku.com/5991077/your-complete-guide-to-the-
simcity...](http://kotaku.com/5991077/your-complete-guide-to-the-simcity-
disaster)

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-...](http://kotaku.com/5990997/coders-discover-20+minute-offline-
timeout-in-simcity)

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...](http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/19xb2m/a_letter_from_an_ea_employee_to_executives/c8sbzg3)

~~~
hkmurakami
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?

[1] <http://pastebin.com/8NR1EdkN>

~~~
ryusage
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.

~~~
derefr
> JavaScript doesn't get compiled into binary.

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...](https://github.com/rogerwang/node-webkit/wiki/Protect-JavaScript-
source-code-with-v8-snapshot)

~~~
munificent
> 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.

------
josh2600
Looks like he finally grew a pair of balls.

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...](http://codinghorror.typepad.com/.a/6a0120a85dcdae970b0128776fffc6970c-pi)

~~~
potatolicious
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.

~~~
CanSpice
Dead Space sold two million copies as of August 3, 2010.

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?

~~~
munificent
What were their production costs? How much profit did they make?

~~~
Gormo
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.

~~~
munificent
> 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.

~~~
Gormo
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.

------
kevinconroy
"We won't remove the DRM, but we will remove our CEO." - EA

------
hobb0001
> 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.

------
elorant
Could this be linked to the SimCity recent clusterfuck?

~~~
dagw
You mean the clusterfuck that's sold over a million copies so far, a mere two
weeks after launch?

~~~
skore
I honestly don't know: Is a million copies a lot?

I faintly recall other games selling multiple times that on launch.

~~~
xionon
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-
selling_PC_video_g...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-
selling_PC_video_games)

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.

------
niggler
I'm surprised it didnt happen sooner. During his tenure the stock price fell
from over 60 to today's close of 18.71

~~~
loganfrederick
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.

~~~
protomyth
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.

~~~
gamble
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.

------
S_A_P
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.

------
far33d
I predict that the new CEO will be a current or former exec at Zynga - likely
one of the execs that were "poached" from EA a few years ago.

------
tailrecursion
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.

------
Finster
I like the part where he takes responsibility for EA's woes, as if there
wasn't a more systemic issue or anything.

~~~
freehunter
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.

------
lobster45
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.

~~~
darkchasma
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.

~~~
lobster45
You would pay $100 for a BioWare game, but how many other people would?

------
DigitalSea
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.

Can we stop talking about Simcity now?

------
zaidf
Why is every TC story taking me to a list of stories instead of the story
itself?

~~~
saraid216
Not happening for me. Browser extension, maybe?

------
hakanderyal
Some insider information on this would be nice also.

------
cadetzero
Thank goodness. Maybe - MAYBE - this could give EA a breath of fresh air. So
many pieces of AAA IP have been squandered...

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joering2
whats the difference between steeping down and being fired? Seriously asking..

~~~
jusben1369
Nobody gets fired unless it's super ugly. It would have been clear that should
they have another miss he'd be expected to fall on the sword.

~~~
benjarrell
Sadly, I've seen people get fired to cover for CEO mistakes.

~~~
cookiecaper
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.

