In a moment of honesty rarely seen in industry, Electronic Arts' (EA) president and CEO John Pleasants has stated the company's $1 billion losses over the last year are due to a lack of hits.
"If you go back three years, EA would have had 10 or 12 games in the top 30," he told the Guardian. "Look at last year, and we have four or five. You've got to chart. If you don't chart, in the history of the business, you can't get out from underneath it."
"Our hits haven't been good enough. Maybe we didn't market them right, maybe they're not innovative enough. Maybe they're not positioned correctly, maybe the quality's not still the top, top tier that it needs to be."
Pleasants joined EA last year -- certainly not the kind of thing you'd expect a new boss to openly discuss. Moving forward, he says big hits are the key to alleviation:
"That all needs to be worked out of the system so we've got big, blockbuster, tentpole titles … I think then you may start to feel a little bit of reprieve from some of the pressures that we've been under."
Looking back at the last fiscal year, we see EA's bigger names include Mirror's Edge, Dead Space, Mass Effect, Skate 2, Need for Speed Undercover, FIFA 09, NHL 09, Spore, Madden NFL 09, Battlefield: Bad Company, Boom Blox, and Burnout Paradise. Quite notable, they've also been experimenting with free to play, ad-supported, and microtransaction-based models with Battlefield Heroes and Battleforge.
As far as we're concerned, that's a pretty impressive list of games, and the less huge titles we can't really say anything bad about either. Dead Space and Mirror's Edge didn't chart so well at first, but like anything fresh (Dead Space's plot aside), it takes awhile to get through, and it did in the end, each pulling in well over a million sales based on figures of a few months ago.
Their 2009-10 lineup highlights consist of The Sims 3, Crysis 2, Fight Night Round 4, Battlefield: 1943, Mass Effect 2, Need for Speed: Shift, Dante's Inferno, The Saboteur, APB, Star Wars: The Old Republic, and Dragon Age: Origins.
It feels a bit weird to say this since we gave EA a lot of heat last year, but on some level it's a real shame they had to make the cuts they did (1,100 jobs!); they've been putting a lot of money into some really original and much needed titles in the industry and that deserves reward. It's our estimation innovation, quality, or any of that stuff isn't really the problem, it's EA's reputation. Especially in the last couple of years, they've gotten more flak than ever, between DRM and horror stories of work and business ethics -- it's going to take time before things turn around and gamers warm up to the idea of a "new EA", if things really have changed as much as we'd like to think.
