John Riccitiello is sending out the battle cry to EA and says that 2K Sports’ All Pro Football 2K ’08, the direct competitor to EA’s Madden NFL Football game, is "not repeatable." His comments were made during a recent shareholder conference call.
He said, "…you want to make sure that [it] ends up being a blip and is not repeatable, because we like to defend our franchises aggressively."
Wow. These sound like fighting words to us. With the addition of Peter Moore, formally of Microsoft, heading the EA Sports division, it looks like Riccitiello isn’t just bluffing.
EA was just recently bumped from its long standing position of world’s largest 3rd party game publisher by Activision. No doubt, the alarm bells are sounding off at EA headquarters in protecting their valuable franchise turf.
But franchises are the bane of EA’s problems, it would seem, as other game companies are cranking out fresh new material rather than going the route of sequels — and making a ton of money to boot.
[via joystiq]
