Electronic Arts CEO, John Riccitiello, has stated that his investors really don't care about quality when it comes to software, explaining that higher review scores don't translate into stock sales.
"I don't think the investors give a sh*t about our quality. They care about our earnings per share. They wait for it to happen. We had three years where we didn't make our expectations. If I were an investor, I would wait and see. That's fine with me," Riccitiello explained when broaching the subject of EA's stock failing to shift despite the rise in review scores. Electronic Arts' outspoken CEO also touched upon the ongoing battle for Take-Two.
"I don't care if people write about Take-Two. It doesn't matter to me. What matters to me is that ... we're making progress toward that goal," claimed Riccitiello. "Having clever verbal sword play about Take-Two doesn't really matter. I'm not really playing for a headline in the New York Times."
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Contest:
7:57 AM on 07.22.2008
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I don't understand how you could mess that up.
I can see why investors only think about a return on their money, but they fail to look at the EA brand. If EA only made quality games all the time, people would probably choose EA over a competitor publisher more often. Like how they look at Madden and automatically buy it because they know the name.
If EA and Activision have a generic title that looks the same from the boxart/screenshots, people that don't read up on stuff will just judge it by what they know: if one of the two is known to release great games, odds are that this publisher's version of the generic title might be a bit better than the other.
Hopefully the ever increasing importance of profits over creating a good product will eventually come to its inevitable conclusion and boardroom cunts like this will be out of a job because their games are that watered down, badly made and franchises so whored out that people stop buying them. I certainly won't be buying Mass Effect 2 or 3 having seen the shoddy state the first one was released in.
Smug cuntflap.
Look at the source of the article - an interview in VentureBeat. The guy asking the questions was trying to provoke him.
It's Captain Obvious
With his knowledge of facts
That everybody knows
he was speaking with disdain on the fact that investors don't take the ratings a public acceptance seriously enough. He wasnt being a smug bastard, he was calling them out for their ignorance of the system.
I worked for a popular computer company and our investor's could care less if we ripped customers or had horrible customer support: as long as we were making them some cheese, it was all good.
He's right as their investors are sitting on a beach somewhere with their pace makers ticking away grumbling at how wrong this new generation is.
Some of the questions are pretty stupid, like basically asking the CEO of a primarily multiplatform publisher which one he likes best but he was pretty fair with his responses to questions about stock seem like (somewhat unsurprised) dismay more than anything.
They're still evil though.
Investors care about sales. Good games sell. Mediocre games sell to people who either just don't know, or they don't care because they're the type who keeps paying $60 for a fresh roster each year. With DLC coming of age, friends of mine who used to fit into the latter category are starting to get wise to EA's scam.