EA's CEO Riccitiello, Wants Payback For MW2 Success

[Atrayo]

Hi All,

Yesterday, the "Industry Gamers" website wrote some remarks made by EA CEO John Riccitiello.

Whereas Riccitiello believes Medal of Honor and Battlefield will innovate, he thinks Infinity Ward's gameplay formula is getting stale. "I think the Infinity Ward guys are great. ... I'm a fan of a lot of our competitors' products. But if you've played Modern Warfare, and you've played the first one — and you've played the last Call of Duty — it's sort of starting to feel like they're making the same game again," he quipped.

Link to the article.

The article starts off about the blurb that the next "Medal of Honor" game will be set in Afghanistan.

[theZee]

Seems to me that Activision/IW have opened a can of worms with their treatment of PC players and MW2. From what I have seen, the game really is a lot like it's predecessor, except shinier, more guns and more perks but more expensive. Whether EA succeeds in usurping Activision as the best FPS publisher remains to be seen, but so far the signs are very promising.

It looks like they are going for the double whammy here as well. BCBF2 is going to be released in March and if they push hard, they might actually release the next installment of MOH towards the end of next year, and that could very well be the last nail in Activision's coffin.

[Reoh]

The CEO of Activision has blatantly said he's only interested in games he can pound out sequels reguarly. He's not interested in quality, just quantity (of money). Thats not a good recipe for the consumer, who will drift to something else as soon as a decent prospect presents itself.

[Mysterio3]

yeah, but once the money stops coming in, they'll already have earned heaps and thus if they want, they could spend heaps making a new epic game (at times through poaching the developers from other companies)

also who cares, as long as the game is awesome (which it is cept for the javelin glitch and the inability to select gaming region), its all good. Fairly sure they set a new record for first week profit throughout the industry with MW2, so i doubt anyone at activision is even slightly bothered by this. cuz seriously, articles like this make the other companies seem like sore losers who are just complaining cuz they got beat.

[ColdCamV]

Yeah thats true they wouldnt care by the ammount of cash they just got in.

And they did break a record of most games sold in the first week or something..supposedly the first hour of it going out they sold over 1 million copies in the US alone so i doubt they complaining. Also they well outselled the first game enarly doubling the amount of games sold...so they all happy over at activision/IW.

[theZee]

Keep in mind, EA is a massive company and they are also well known, so we're not talking some indie developer talking tough. They most definitely have the capital, the will and the IP to roll right over Activision and MW2.

Both BF and MOH are well established quality games, so if they go on and improve them, success if pretty much guaranteed. Also, if you have a look a Dice, developer for BFBC2, they are engaging the PS3, Xbox and PC communities like IW never have. They are certainly looking like they know how to go about creating a quality product and are keen to take on feedback and input from their future customers.

[Mysterio3]

thing is, EA is also well known for their notoriously crap support system for their games. no BF title has ever come close to matching the numbers for MW2.
sure EA is so big that Activision prolly wont be able to to buy them out, but if Activision keeps earning more on each release than EA on its BF titles, it'd only be a matter of time before Activision pushes EA out of the fps market either by acquiring the BF franchise or simply waiting for EA to ditch it (and EA has a record of ditching high demand titles simply cuz they werent making enough out of it)
as for engaging the community, activision did it too.. they just chose to ignore the PC part cuz it was a minority group which they didnt care about. and if you look at the responses to ingame issues, activision easy does better than EA. Javelin glitch from MW2, within 48hours of it being discovered, activision, partnering with MS announced that bans will be placed on any account caught using it. sure most people wont get caught, but atleast they are trying. EA's response to the endless amounts of glitches and exploits in BC1 was to post on their homepage "We're working on it", its been nearly two years, and none of the issues have been resolved. stuff like that will play a huge part in people's attitude towards EA.
as for MoH, its great and all, but it was never in the same league as BF2 and CoD4 (and now MW2) in terms of popularity.

[Mecha-Wombat]

EA have already stated they will be giving developers time to polish product EA admitted they have had QUALITY issues that they are not happy with and are giving time before release rather than pushing like some "other" publishers did on games BFBC2 is one of those games

we are going to see what happens when March rolls around

[C4]

Originally Posted by Mysterio3

. Javelin glitch from MW2, within 48hours of it being discovered, activision, partnering with MS announced that bans will be placed on any account caught using it. sure most people wont get caught, but atleast they are trying.

The real test is how fast they fix the glitch.

[Mysterio3]

yes, but even if they dont get around to fixing it for a month, just saying they will ban the glitch exploiters alone is doing more than EA usually does for their games.