EA’s Riccitiello Talks DRM, Ads and the Economy

Like many high profile corporate executives, EA’s CEO John Riccitiello has his share of fans and critics.  They exist among gamers and stock watchers alike. Some support his stewardship of the gaming company.  Other’s can’t stand it.  Regardless of perspective, one thing that’s hard to argue about is his candor.  Riccitiello has a penchant for speaking directly and sharing his thoughts.  In New York for Dow Jones Media Money survey this week, he sounded off on issues from the prospect of working with Google, to Digital Rights Management to the effect of the downturn on the industry.  In summary, without interpretation, here are the excerpts:

On Google AdSense for Games: “The quick answer is, of course we would partner with them and anybody else who would write us a check."  A little more long winded: “I always pay attention to what Google is doing. Right now, the In-Game AdSense initiative isn’t something that large. But when they want to take a meeting, we’ll be willing to listen."

On the economy’s impact on gaming: "I think it’s going to be a strong holiday season…the video game industry so far this year has been stunningly strong…”  but: “We don’t have a game industry index that goes back to 1929, so I don’t have any data from what happens to the game industry in a market meltdown." 

On sequelitis in game development: “The game industry had gotten a little overhooked on sequels, and EA is not immune to that. We just released our 18th Madden."

On DRM and the venom spit by some at the choices EA made to protect their PC title Spore: “We chose a particularly aggressive form of DRM, which 99.8 percent of consumers would never notice, but that two-tenths of one percent got incredibly focused and formed an online PR cabal. I personally don’t like DRM. It interrupts the user experience. We would like to get around that. But there is this problem called piracy out there."   via Gamasutra: “There are different ways to do DRM; the most successful is what WoW [“World of Warcraft”] does. They just charge you by the month… We’re going to see an evolution of these things. I wish we didn’t live in a world where we had to do these types of things. I want it to be seamless and easy – but I also don’t want to have a bonfire of money.” 
[As a side note: Ubisoft’s upcoming title Far Cry 2 appears to be heading to production with an extremely similar SecuROM protection set up to that used on Spore.  Unlike previous games, however, the system will have a means of deactivating installations to migrate from computer to computer (via Escapist)]

Dynamic Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-Gaming: “I ultimately believe that a consumer is going to want to be involved with a game that they help build rather than one that they just watch or experience.  Spore is probably the industry’s first big step in that direction, and I would encourage you to look out for The Sims 3, which comes out this spring and which is another big step in that direction.”

On the recent cancellation of the Command & Conquer franchise based shooter Tiberium (via Gamasutra): “Any company that serves every dish that comes out of the oven whether it’s burned or not is not committed to quality… U2 made great albums, Steven Spielberg made great films. It doesn’t mean they don’t have their Tiberiums." And… "When something’s not meeting expectations… you can course correct by giving it more time, more money, changing the concept or killing the game. If you’re committed to quality, you take one of those paths."

On online games: "Today what we do, more typically, is we build an online game which often has as much code on a server as it does on a disk and the CPU in your household."

Comments

[Writin_Reg:]

AGAIN John Riccitiello missed the mark on why consumers are unhappy with EA's DRM, just as he totally is out in left field over the numbers who are fed up with EA's DRM. We could care less about DRM because real gamers buy their games, don't steal them. Real gamers tell buddies looking over their shoulders as they play the new games to go BUY YOUR OWN. Real gamers that prefer PC Games over console (because lets face facts in a low economy a pc makes sense to spend money on, but consoles don't seeing our lives involve a lot more than just gaming and pc's fit in a money tight household because of this) also cannot afford to have software like EA's games disabling half the hardware on your pc - because it is a pc - your pc, not EA's - that you have to use to do other things besides gaming. The fact is John Riccitiello has just grabbed numbers out of the air and has not looked at the actual numbers of angry pc owners whose had to face hardware replacements and huge pc bills because the family computer ran EA's published games like Mass Affect, Spore, and The Sims 2's last three expansion packs that all have this awful Securom DRM. Every game site that was established for these different games have as many gamers with unuseable or damaged pcs from these games, as they have gamers still playing. So in my book the actual figures of angry gamers with EA is more like 50%, not.2%. John Riccitiello needs to get his head out of the sand and actually visit the game sites. Also on the Spore game site and the Sims 2, you are not allowed to post any of your DRM problems on the main boards or they will ban you. On Spore if you get banned, your game will no longer work if you can not connect to the site. This is EA's idea of apparently keeping their number of troubled gamers actually known, apparently. But they fail to realize we are not pcs, and they cannot stop our mouths from warning others of how EA actually deals with this DRM. Fact is EA does have the games many of us prefer to spend our money on, but because of the DRM and our experience with it, we'd be idiots to buy these games.

2008 Oct 20 12:23 PM