John Riccitiello, CEO of Electronic Arts, made some astounding statements, and depending on how you take them, you’ll either fall down laughing or slap your face in disbelief.
EA, the monolith that has been cranking out franchise after franchise and buying up game companies for well over a decade says that bad games hurt the game industry.
We pause to let everyone pick themselves off of the floor.
He said that EA is no longer "in the business of exploiting other people’s licenses with bad quality games."
We pause again…
"I think what redeems our industry is quality and I think we take a step back every time we take a license and exploit it with a crappy game–that’s not what we’re about. We’ve been there, most of our competitors are there or have been there. That’s not what we do. We’re not really after that market," Riccitiello said.
This change of heart by the former number one game publisher isn’t for no reason. Activision dethroned the EA kingpin as EA shares and performance slid. EA took measures to shakeup the management by replacing key figures in the organization in order to revitalize slumping market share.
Is this really a new EA or just hype? EA has been accused of buying up intellectual property instead of developing original ideas for quite a while. With the recent hostile takeover bid actions of EA to buyout Take-Two, it seems as if nothing has really changed in this area.
But EA has seen the writing on the wall and may finally be coming to grips that constantly pumping out old franchises and old game ideas is not the answer in growing the company. Larry Probst, the former CEO of EA, should know. Riccitiello replaced him.
[via MTVmultiplayer]
