Electronic Arts: videogame industry just plain sucks!
By George Gardner
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, John Riccitiello, Electronic Arts’ new CEO, claims the videogame industry is in trouble and needs to change its ways quickly or it will risk loosing audiences to other forms of entertainment.
Mr. Riccitiello says, “We’re boring people to death and making games that are harder and harder to play.” EA has relied the formula of pushing out a monotonous strew of sequels to once popular games, and now, Riccitiello worries that EA and the rest of the industry simply lacks innovation.
This coming from a 47 year-old CEO who, surprisingly, sees the whole picture. It’s well known that companies will either push sequels to games, copy other popular games, or release titles based on popular movies, all of which seem to based off the same gaming engine.
Developers will simply throw a new face on an old game; and who can blame them? It may not make a great profit, but it’s easy, cheap, and above all, it buys the innovative games time for development.
“For the most part, the industry has been rinse-and-repeat,” Riccitiello told WSJ. “There’s been lots of product that looked like last year’s product, that looked a lot like the year before.”
It’s good to see Mr. Riccitiello taking notice that the videogame industry just plain sucks, but his message seems to be aimed at Electronic Arts, rather than the industry as a whole.
Take-Two Interactive’s Rockstar Games, for example, have released such groundbreaking games that its sequels are even successful, given they don’t get banned on every console.
Riccitiello also worries that other forms of entertainment such as “the next cool cellphone” or “Facebook and iPods” threaten to put the gaming industry at risk.
Maybe Riccitiello is just blowing smoke; at the very least, he’s acknowledged that something must be done. The next step is to take action by canning Madden Football and start developing a new SimCity.
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