SimCity is back, gaming is dead, RIP gaming.

[Paelos]

The answer of that 7% is likely close to zero.

Long run investors buy and sell stocks based on earnings, forecasts, product changes, proformas, etc. They are looking for a return over 3-5 years minimum, likely closer to 10 years before they start to care about a move. They don't really give a shit if a CEO leaves, unless they tie earnings directly to that CEO (almost nobody in the long run would unless it was the founder of the company). They don't make reactionary moves on a stock, that's short run mentality.

Short run guys bet a hunch. They are looking for something that says the market is on the move based off of any news, good or bad. They are playing with fire. Short run investors (for the most part) are giant idiots. They are the fish at the poker table. They will win some, they will lose more. They will lie constantly about how much they lose. They are also the most likely to write articles about how awesome they are, when in actuality you never see their portfolio.

Compare them to Warren Buffet, who is worth around $50B, and is the ultimate long term guy. Buffett in 1999 wrote that he thought that a good return on equities ahead of inflation would be 6%. At the time, that was seen as complete bullshit, since we were rocking a bubble of insane proportions. The DOW was at 11,700 at the turn of the millenium. It's now at 14,400. Turns out he was even optimistic about that, since the true growth of the market in that time frame has been about 1.5% a year.

[rk47]

GOTY 2013

[Ginaz]

"As part of the arrangement, Riccitiello will continue to be paid his base salary for the next two years, totaling north of $1.7 million."

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/188732/Breaking_EA_CEO_John_Riccitiello_steps_down.php

[rk47]

..yeah. paid 2 fail.

I'm expecting this more to go down in EA office from now on....

[Paelos]

EA now goes back to Probst for the time being, who pretty much manned the helm while EA took over the top end market until 2004. Things started to dwindle up to 2007 with people wondering if they needed a new direction.

Enter John Riccitiello. A man who left EA and returned after less than a few years. Why? As he put it, "Our game quality was down, and our costs were high. I could see a fundamental digital transformation coming to our industry that we were not even prepared for. The hardest part was that we were in deep denial."

Ironic words almost 6 years later. I think they are still in deep denial. JR made sure while he was gone from EA, and with a deal with Elevation Partners (private equity firm), that their group acquire Pandemic and Bioware in a swooping takeover for $300M. Guess what the first move was as CEO for JR? Buying Bioware and Pandemic from his former group for $860M.

If you want to lay the failures of Bioware and Pandemic at anyone's feet, it's JR. One is dead, and the other is suffocating slowly, with the two remaining founders of Bioware retiring. It will become a rudderless ship that bears no resemblance to the company it once was, and the changes all happened within the last 5 years.

[Ironwood]

JR made sure while he was gone from EA, and with a deal with Elevation Partners (private equity firm), that their group acquire Pandemic and Bioware in a swooping takeover for $300M. Guess what the first move was as CEO for JR? Buying Bioware and Pandemic from his former group for $860M.
.

Seriously ?

 

[Paelos]

Absolutely.

[Ironwood]

That's almost the exact same shit a CEO at one of my previous places pulled.  Make sure you have a plan to make bank coming in, drain off a couple of million to you and your brother, then step down citing 'personal issues'.  The same personal issues that didn't stop you taking another high profile CEO position at a similar type of firm.

I haven't looked to see if he fleeced that place and fled yet.

[Fabricated]

I'll never buy it off Origin. I'll never buy anything off Origin. That system is a piece of fucking shit and EA just isn't worth it.

Yeah that was part of it, then I ended up buying Battlefield 3 and I really enjoyed that.

Origin is the worst part of it though, followed by battlelog.

You give you an idea of this genius in case you've never played or looked at Battlefield 3.

-Battlefield 3, any of it (even single player), has to be launched from Battlelog which is a webpage that you have to install a special launcher plugin for.
-The game itself is still an Origin game so the game still also needs launched from Origin.

So when I launch Battlefield 3 from its desktop icon, it launches origin then launches whatever my default browser is and opens Battlelog. Then when I find a server I wanna play on or quickmatch and go to join, the browser plugin touches Origin again and makes it launch the game to connect.

Battlelog itself isn't *terrible*, in that it works generally. I get why they did it; it consolidates all the stupid data/friend/server shit and lets them change all of that without having to make fundamental changes to the client every time they add a new server filter or decide to make the server list look different or add some functionality (like setting up your kits before you even launch the actual game). It's just that Origin being the middle-man in all of it is retarded and terrible.

[Yoru]

I bought Battlefield 3 last year because a bunch of my friends are enormous Battlefield fanboys and were playing it nonstop. I regret it immensely; they added a massive unlockables grind to the game (circumventable by MTX, of course), and the unlockables are clearly superior to your starting peashooter gear in every way.

Never buying another Battlefield ever again.

[Fabricated]

Well to be fair that's not 100% true. The starting kit for all the classes is actually pretty good. The starter M-something variants are all so good they've had to be nerfed so people would use some of the 200000 other guns they put in the game. A lot of the unlockable guns kinda suck or are rough equivalents at best; including like 75% of the LMGs.

The real problem with the unlocks is that perks and gadgets need unlocks as well. Perks are a big deal; especially vehicle perks. You're fucking meat in a tank/heli/jet without some of the perks and you have to *use* those vehicles while you're a useless detriment to the team to unlock them. Also the infantry perks while not earth shattering are really nice to have and you have to unlock all of those as well, then unlock them all over again as squad perks.

To get everything however is a hilarious grind. I'll have to check my battlelog to see how long it took me to get most of my unlocked stuff. I didn't particularly go out of my way to get specific stuff and it'll STILL look really stupid when I post it.

Edit: Yeah, I just recently hit colonel (basically when you stop getting rank unlocks) and I have...90 hours and 30 minutes into the game. So yeah. Note I did not touch co-op, nor have I played hardly any time as a recon. Meaning I spent the majority of my time as the other 3 classes and I still don't have all the class-related unlocks.

[tgr]

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-03-19-peter-moore-kotaku-reveling-in-self-smugness-over-riccitiello-resignation


BE NICE TO RICCITIELLO!

[Fabricated]

I really hate this "There but for the grace of god go I" shit that everyone in all industries does when this sort of thing happens.

[Ironwood]

I'm supposed to feel sorry for a guy who will earn 1.7 million doing fuck all for the next two years just because he lost his job ?

Seriously ?  Fuck that.

[UnSub]

If you want to lay the failures of Bioware and Pandemic at anyone's feet, it's JR.

Definitely agree about Pandemic, but BioWare's issue was the opposite - he gave them so much rope that an accident was bound to happen.

[rk47]

[Ghambit]

JR made sure while he was gone from EA, and with a deal with Elevation Partners (private equity firm), that their group acquire Pandemic and Bioware in a swooping takeover for $300M. Guess what the first move was as CEO for JR? Buying Bioware and Pandemic from his former group for $860M.
.

Seriously ?

 

Wow man, you dont remember that thread eh?  Interesting times back then when these deals went through.

[Paelos]

Definitely agree about Pandemic, but BioWare's issue was the opposite - he gave them so much rope that an accident was bound to happen.

He did in the beginning. That's because he couldn't afford to have the board notice he made over $500M for his buddies on two studios that went tits up in a couple of years. That kind of shit gets you sued.

Once that grace period passed? Do you really think it's an accident that games were fine in 2007-2010 for Bioware? Then OOPS here's the copy pasta mess of DA2 in 2011. Then the onslaught of bullshit began. SWTOR falling on it's face, and ME3 with the ending nonsense and the day 1 DLC, whereas ME2 had two free DLC's on release.

His fingers were back in the pie in 2011. It's not a shock that the founders left after a year of that nonsense.

[tgr]

I would've thought it would've behooved them to milk things benignly, instead of now having to find a new developer with a new set of IPs to monetize before players catch on.

[Ghambit]

Tbh, JR was really just Elevation Partners' bitch-boy.  There's a whole row of suits (Bono's U2 included) that were involved in all of that, with JR the man who actually made everything happen.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-03-19-peter-moore-kotaku-reveling-in-self-smugness-over-riccitiello-resignation

BE NICE TO RICCITIELLO!

The comments in there are pretty hilarious.  An industry site, and people are posting as if they have no fuckin clue of the monetary shenanigans.   "Guys, we shouldn't be mean when someone loses their job."  
Anyone with any real thought can easily pin gaming's loss of quality the past 10 yrs to bullshit like JR and his equity cronies kept pulling on these studios.

[Segoris]

DLC Quest

[HaemishM]

I'm supposed to feel sorry for a guy who will earn 1.7 million doing fuck all for the next two years just because he lost his job ?

Seriously ?  Fuck that.

Yeah this. Fuck him in his earhole. I don't have a lot of sympathy for executives anyway, and especially not EA execs. I still haven't forgiven them for signing an exclusive contract with the NFL so that Madden is the ONLY NFL football game that can be released every year. They KILLED the best football game ever in NFL 2k series and that kind of shit just doesn't stop hurting - especially when every year's Madden fucks up most of the successes of the last year's game without fixing any of its brokenness.

[Paelos]

As a side note, EA's stock took a dump this morning, already dropping 8% in a day.

So no, biz journo guys, the investors on the whole aren't happy with EA or this move. They see the writing on the wall from the coming earnings reports, and I would not be shocked if the stock kept falling until a successor gets named.

[Soln]

Peter Moore, Electronic Arts COO and potential candidate to become the publisher's next CEO in the wake of John Riccitiello's resignation, has made it a habit of late to call out some members of the media.

I didn't get farther than that sentence.  It's just PM making a public move for the role.  That's all.  Or covering his ass with investors/board/etc.

[Paelos]

If Moore gets the job, EA won't get better. It will get worse. They should be looking for somebody that's not internal to shift the PR away from "Same ole EA."

[Ironwood]

Call Kotick.

[Soulflame]

He's still preoccupied with ruining Blizzard.

[WayAbvPar]

The need to exhume the guy who was running the place back when they had flat boxes!

[Paelos]

As much as people hate Kotick, I've held stock in ATVI since 2011, and I don't consider them to be in near the financial shape that EA is heading.

[Sky]

Yeah this. Fuck him in his earhole. I don't have a lot of sympathy for executives anyway, and especially not EA execs. I still haven't forgiven them for signing an exclusive contract with the NFL so that Madden is the ONLY NFL football game that can be released every year. They KILLED the best football game ever in NFL 2k series and that kind of shit just doesn't stop hurting - especially when every year's Madden fucks up most of the successes of the last year's game without fixing any of its brokenness.

It's kind of weird that one thing resonates so hard...but I agree completely. I'll even go one step further and say fuck them for releasing the pc port /at least/ one (if not three) years behind the consoles (engine-wise) before killing the pc port entirely in 08.

Guess why I never bought a current gen console? EA.

[Morat20]

I would've thought it would've behooved them to milk things benignly, instead of now having to find a new developer with a new set of IPs to monetize before players catch on.

You poor, naive fool.

That's not how "business" works in America. It's pump and dump, especially for CEO's. You come in, maximize short-term profits, exercise your options, sell your stock, and then just run the fucker down until they pay you to go away. Wherein you sell yourself on how much you made originally, blame the market or the board or the economy for the decline, and get welcomed aboard.

The really smart -- and ballsy -- ones make sure they have some property to either sell or buy coming in and out, so they can make even more on the side.

[UnSub]

Definitely agree about Pandemic, but BioWare's issue was the opposite - he gave them so much rope that an accident was bound to happen.

He did in the beginning. That's because he couldn't afford to have the board notice he made over $500M for his buddies on two studios that went tits up in a couple of years. That kind of shit gets you sued.

Once that grace period passed? Do you really think it's an accident that games were fine in 2007-2010 for Bioware? Then OOPS here's the copy pasta mess of DA2 in 2011. Then the onslaught of bullshit began. SWTOR falling on it's face, and ME3 with the ending nonsense and the day 1 DLC, whereas ME2 had two free DLC's on release.

His fingers were back in the pie in 2011. It's not a shock that the founders left after a year of that nonsense.

I don't like being in the position of defending EA / JR, but...

It's not like JR was writing game scripts. Yes, there's a good argument that BioWare was stretched too thin and that DA2 required longer before release to make it work, but I think it lets BioWare off much too easily to say that all mis-steps during that era were due to JR. Entirely personal opinion, but it seemed to me that BioWare got too insular and self-focused, with writers trained to write the BioWare way. Sorry, but I find it too convenient that in a company involving hundreds of people that it was JR's fault ME3's ending wasn't what people wanted.

I think EAs biggest failing under JR was its decision to focus on 'core franchises'. They needed (and still need) to take a bit more risk with a few quirky titles and see what catches on. Focusing on core titles works right up to the point that gamers tire of those franchises, which can easily happen if sequels are pumped out year-on-year. And yes, DLC isn't a huge positive either, but generally they sold well enough to keep making them.

Also, the strategy behind Origin was correct, but the execution let it down.

[Morat20]

DA2 was the total opposite of ME2. In ME2, they took the core of ME1 and polished the fuck out of it. Resulting in a game with all the story,  but superior gameplay. They tossed what wasn't working, took what did work and made it better. Sure it wasn't perfect -- heat sinks and scanning come to mind -- but all in all they kept the spirit of the game while improving it.

DA2 was the total opposite. I still haven't finished it, and I beat DA three times. The changes were...annoying. The mechanics felt stupid. Some of the story was good, but they totally wrecked the feel of the game -- what came out the other end was basically an entirely different (and crappier) game set in the same universe, not a sequel.

Starting with goddamn darkspawn that CLEARLY SPAWN IN. Not even the grace of "yanking themselves from the Fade" or "coming out of stealth" just gottamn OGRE FROM THIN AIR.

The combat mechanics were balls. It was just absolute shit.

I don't blame the CEO of EA for that, but surely something happened in the management chain there that resulted in "Let's totally fucking change the game but keep the name and pretend it's a sequel". It wasn't NGE "Fuck the game people liked, we're going for something new" since I could still play Dragon Age and DA2 was, you know, playable and not that bad. But it didn't even feel even remotely like it had.

Edited to add: That change for DA2 didn't feel like developers thinking "reloading is fun" or "we need a replacement for random Mako driving". It felt like management said "Make the game more exciting. Faster paced. More...shooter like. Make it more like Mass Effect, you know, but with dragons and shit". (Obviously it's not a cover based shooter or a shooter at all, but the rapid combat mechanics seemed like an imposed change, not an organic evolution).

[rk47]

[Paelos]

Also, the strategy behind Origin was correct, but the execution let it down.

Agreed. They needed to move to digital. That was one of his main selling points when he took over. I disagree that "focusing on core franchises" was a problem. If anything, in the economy we were all saddled with in 2008, taking risks wasn't going to be an option. It was basically survival mode. Find what works, make it continue to produce, and we'll worry about the future if we can stay afloat through this mess.

Where EA fell over, and continues to fall over to this day, is they either knowingly or unknowingly declared war on their customers. It's the Citizen Kane mentality taken to the gaming world. People will do what we tell them to do, accept what we give them, and be damned grateful we continue to offer them our products. They've made it a point to not only bleed their consumers, but actively lie to them in the process in the futile hopes they are too stupid to know or care.

The sad thing is that works, but only for a little while. And now we're starting to see the beginning of the blow-back from such practices.