Electronic Arts has boiled down its less-than-stellar 2008 performance to the barest of bones. Speaking at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet conference about a year that saw job cuts at the games publishing giant, EA's COO John Pleasants said, “The biggest thing was that we didn’t make hits.”
Well, hats off to Pleasants for not mincing his words. At least part of the reason for that was the size of EA's line up. “You can lose your way on basic execution when you have too many games”, said Pleasants.
You may remember that EA is cutting back on its product line in 2009, not to mention staff.
While EA is in the midst of cutting jobs in excess of 1,000, however, it plans to expand its marketing efforts as well as changing its approach to web-based promotion and taking a longer lead time for pimping its wares.
Pleasants' words aren't a million miles from those of EA's CEO, Johns Riccitiello, following the reporting of the publisher's latest financials. Back at the start of February, Riccitiello said that the company's titles, "did not perform to our expectations".
Hopefully EA's failure to create hits won't mean that the creation of new properties, which we saw from EA with titles such as Mirror's Edge (reviewed here) and Dead Space (poked at with a stick here) last year, will drop off the publisher's list of priorities. When job cuts were announced back in December EA wanted us to know that it remained committed to "taking creative risks" and "investing in new games". But that was back in the good old days of 2008...
Source: Forbes
Well, hats off to Pleasants for not mincing his words. At least part of the reason for that was the size of EA's line up. “You can lose your way on basic execution when you have too many games”, said Pleasants.
You may remember that EA is cutting back on its product line in 2009, not to mention staff.
While EA is in the midst of cutting jobs in excess of 1,000, however, it plans to expand its marketing efforts as well as changing its approach to web-based promotion and taking a longer lead time for pimping its wares.
Pleasants' words aren't a million miles from those of EA's CEO, Johns Riccitiello, following the reporting of the publisher's latest financials. Back at the start of February, Riccitiello said that the company's titles, "did not perform to our expectations".
Hopefully EA's failure to create hits won't mean that the creation of new properties, which we saw from EA with titles such as Mirror's Edge (reviewed here) and Dead Space (poked at with a stick here) last year, will drop off the publisher's list of priorities. When job cuts were announced back in December EA wanted us to know that it remained committed to "taking creative risks" and "investing in new games". But that was back in the good old days of 2008...
Source: Forbes
Companies:
Electronic Arts
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Comments
Jeff 27 Feb 2009 11:12
1/3
Glad John Pleasants and John Riccitello are so well paid to come up with this. I know staff at EA and they've been saying for 2 years that they were worried about line up and constantly being asked to do 'more with less' which basically meant spending time on small titles that nobody wants to buy and not getting enough time on getting the major ones right.
SPInGSPOnG 27 Feb 2009 12:03
2/3
The Major ones suck. No one NEEDS another Madden, PGA or FIFA. We need games like Dead Space and Mirror's Edge, we just need Mirror's Edge to be that tiny bit more compelling.
OptimusP 1 Mar 2009 19:19
3/3
Dead Space and Mirror's Edge needed more content...and less american-made stamped all over their production values. And well, Mirror's Edge was on the wrong console in the first place, should have been a Wii/PC game with mous/IR pointing controls and the team should have consisted for 75% of level-designers.