If you gave me five, seven or even 10 guesses about who outgoing EA CEO John Riccitielloās favorite character on HBOās acclaimed show The Wire was, Iād have gotten it wrong.
The Wire ran for five seasons. It was a show about class and crime. Its cast was an ensemble of cops, crooks and the everyday working people just trying to get by. Many viewers were drawn to the drug dealers, particularly the complex captains of the trade. If you watched, maybe you identified with the ambitious, icy Marlo, the crafty, ruthless Avon or the suave, educated Stringer Bell.
John Riccitielloās favorite Wire character wasnāt any of those guys. Guess number four would have been wrong, too. It wasnāt the seemingly invincible outlaw Omar either.
I canāt remember why, two or three years ago, I was even asking Riccitiello this question. But one day, through an intermediary in EA public relations, I got an answer.
Wee-Bey.
Who in the world watches The Wire and picks as their favorite the gravel-voiced hitman who rarely gets any screen time?
***
A day after Riccitielloās simultaneously surprising and unsurprising resignation from the gaming giant he led for seven years, it is not yet clear what the future holds for EA and EAās games. So strange was Riccitielloās tenure, that itās not even clear what EAās recent past truly held.
https://lastchance.cc/ea-ceo-john-riccitiello-steps-down-5991181%3C/a%3E%3C/p%3E
I always left my meetings with Riccitiello optimistic for gaming and gamers.
That might strike you as odd, given EAās once and seemingly current rep as a rather cold, mechanical company. Before Riccitiello, EA was gamingās so-called evil empire, after all. They were a gaming factory, a place where Will Wright had to make The Sims on the sly since others in the studio werenāt going to get it, where, instead of competing to make the best football game out there, the company made sure that no one other than them was even allowed to make an NFL video game.
But this was the Riccitiello I sat down with in December 2009:
https://lastchance.cc/fewer-games-better-games-is-eas-stated-goal-5419037%3C/a%3E%3C/p%3E
That ācrassā bit? If I recall correctly, it was his wink to me regarding some questions Iād asked him about some day-one downloadable content for a game called The Saboteur that made the women in the gameās cabaret topless. It was an incentive for people to purchase the game new. It was also one of EAās weirder early experiments in putting online hooks in seemingly offline games, giving players reason to verify their copy of a game with EAās servers and maybe get some new content out of it.
The Saboteur was a perfect game to encapsulate Riccitielloās tenure and to highlight the stresses EA faced. The game took too many years to make and was built, expensively out of studios headquartered in Los Angeles (Riccitiello shut them down). It was creatively ambitious, because instead of simply being an open-world clone of Grand Theft Auto or True Crime, it was a game that let the player assume the role of a freedom fighter in occupied France during World War II. It colored its world black, white and red, until the player liberated zones and restored color to the world. By the time it came out it suffered gameplay comparisons to the historical urban adventures of the Assassinās Creeds, but it was still like no other.
The Saboteur was not a game youād expect from a factory or an evil empire. It was creative and fun. At worst, it was an interesting, refreshing underachiever. It also had no place where EA was going.
***
What it always seemed Riccitiello was right about was that he was convinced that games were services. He no longer wanted to talk about games as products that you get and are stuck with. Iād talk to top people at Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Activisionā¦. you name it. And it was only Riccitiello and Valveās Gabe Newell who talked this way about keeping in touch with customers, about games evolving and adapting.
I thought I knew what was to come. I kept waiting to see Madden cease being a product, to cease being an annual release and to turn into an ever-evolving game. It hasnāt happened.
But compare the Mass Effect that came out before that gameās studio was part of EA to the third, by which time it was. The first came out, had some downloadable content within a few months, then didnāt have more for more than a year. The third game had day-one DLC (that had to be paid for, many gamers grumbled) and then regular releases for a year after, expanding multiplayer and deepening single-player. Battlefield 3 was no single release. It was a year and a halfās worth of content: the first game and then piles of DLC. As a gamer, I liked this. I liked my games adapting and growing. And though I get most of my games sent to me by publishers for free, I pay for most DLC and happily plunked down more Microsoft points whenever I wanted to play even more Mass Effect
When Iād meet with Riccitiello at E3s or in hotel lobbies in New York, Iād always have a litany of things to bug him about. Heād keep talking about taking some of the first-person shooter market away from Call of Duty, but EAās shooters werenāt quite doing it. And what of that burst of non-shooter creativity that was Mirrorās Edge? Why were the interesting-sounding games like Steven Spielbergās LMNO (North by Northwest with aliens??) being cancelled? Where were the hit games? And why did it seem that talented people were always leaving EAāWill Wright and the Henry Hatsworth guys, to name some?
Riccitiello would take it all in and then tell me what he thought was going right. And in 2010, he told me how he thought EA should and would function, and how different this was from how big companies used to make games:
āI used to buy a whole bunch of titles and play them for three weeks and move on and never look at them again,ā he said, before switching from what he does to what you or I might do ā āToday, firstly everyone goes onlineā ā and then settling on what his developers do ā āfive years ago, the standard at every game company was when the game goes gold [and is sent to manufacturing], the 60 people on the title or 160 people, depending on the title, all of them [would be done working on that game] except maybe one or two guys who were gonna take a phone call, when you find out thereās a video card from some Taiwanese hardware manufacturer you didnāt have ideal compatibility with. ā¦ For the most part today, for most games, the entire team remains intact post-ship[ping of the game] for a combination of free and paid [downloadable content], services, server management, code patches, figuring out exactly where people are dying and bunching up in the map, fixing that and improving the experience.ā
This sounded like a company whose games Iād want to buy. This sounded modern. This sounded like the way games could or should be.
Not that Riccitiello always sounded like a proper prophet. I recall him telling me that Spielbergās Wii game would be gamingās long-selling equivalent of Pink Floydās Dark Side of the Moon. Hey, points for optimism, right?
His idea that games would be services still seems astute and correct to me. The realization of that in the form of year-long, evolving Mass Effect and Battlefield experiences feels more good than bad. If thatās the present and future that Riccitiello built, then I wouldnāt be able to regard him as anything other than an overall success.
***
In the middle of Riccitielloās time at EA, the company ran a small pre-E3 press conference that brought in their top creators. They had Alex Rigopulos, head of the studio that had made Guitar Hero and then jumped to make Rock Band for EA. They had Gabe Newell, there to talk about The Orange Box. Under Riccitiello, EA had the good taste to put Criterion on the Need for Speed series and to convince the leaders of Infinity Ward and creators of Call of Duty to make their next game for them.
Riccitiello loved to talk about how EA was getting its gamesā review scores up. Heād tell me and anyone else who would listen that quality would sell.
https://lastchance.cc/who-put-out-the-most-good-video-games-in-2009-update-5424354%3C/a%3E%3C/p%3E
Heād talk about having ālively debatesā with the creators of Mirrorās Edge about a possible sequel. And heād admit that ācooler graphicsā werenāt what Command & Conquer needed. He killed a bad game at the last minute rather than wasting gamersā time with it.
https://lastchance.cc/ea-ceo-mirrors-edge-deserves-to-come-back-design-at-5418000%3C/a%3E%3C/p%3E
His plans sounded awesome. And then there were the results.
EAās FIFA games unseated Konamiās Pro Evolution as the best things in soccer/football.
But, in basketball, EA kept stumbling.
In even years, Need For Speeds were amazing. In odd years, they were not.
EAās biggest rival appeared to be Activision. EA and Riccitiello seemed desperately to want to displace Activisionās success. An alternating annual release of Battlefield/Medal of Honor might take out Call of Duty. Star Wars: The Old Republic would out-wow World of Warcraft. Regarding the former, Riccitiello figured out the formula, perhaps based on what FIFA had accomplished: donāt make just one terrific game, make two terrific shooters in a row. Well, Battlefield 3 in 2011 was, in terms of multiplayer, regarded as very good. Last yearās Medal of Honor? A disaster. And as SW:TOR stumbled and switched from a subscription model to free-to-play, Activision took a left turn, picked the brain of one of their old hands and cooked up Skylanders, a juggernaut for which EA has no answer.
https://lastchance.cc/the-plan-to-dethrone-call-of-duty-5705433%3C/a%3E%3C/p%3E
EA tried to make games with the best big studios in America. They hooked up with Gears of War creators Epic for Bulletstorm, Tim Schaferās Activision-rejected crew to rescue Brutal Legend, and former Sony-only Insomniac for the upcoming Fuse. On Facebook they battled with Zynga, which kept hiring away their producers and developers. On mobile, EA tried some wilder stuff, bought Chillingo and worked with some of their indies. The Simpsons: Tapped Out was a hit, but more headlines went to the EA-published iterations of Flight Control and Real Racing, games that seemed designed to frustrate players enough to make them keep putting quarters in the machine, as it were. (Itās no wonder that this audio snippet has become emblematic of what some gamers disliked about Riccitielloās tenure.)
The overall impression I got from all this was that John Riccitielloās EA would try everything and that there was a logical argument for any piece of it. Of course they should be big on cell phones, big on tablets, big on Facebook, big on consoles, big on handhelds. Big everywhere. Who but them was going to be big in sports, in shooters, in role-playing games, in sci-fi, fantasy and racing? How could a company really pull all of this off? Under Riccitiello, they clearly tried like hell to do all of it. Maybe thatās why itās unsurprising that they didnāt seem to do any of it best of all. They were excellent at being good, not so good at being excellent.
***
Riccitielloās resignation comes at a bad time for EA. The company comes off a bummer of a year that saw Old Republic failing to catch fire and Medal of Honor collapse. More urgently, the new SimCityās launch debacle has undermined EAās chances of convincing anyone that itās ready to lead the way in games as services. The companyās PC-download Origin service, while improving, is still a far cry from the quality of Valveās dominant, competing Steam.
https://lastchance.cc/your-complete-guide-to-the-simcity-disaster-5991077%3C/a%3E%3C/p%3E
In our view, Mr. Riccitielloās greatest achievement was in recognizing that the industry EA competes in was transitioning to digital, and in positioning the company to participate in mobile, social, casual, and PC downloads, while building a subscription MMO business and dramatically expanding the companyās premium downloadable content. EA didnāt hit many home runs during his tenure, but in an environment that saw bankruptcies of Midway Games, Atari and THQ, EA managed to gain market share and hit many solid singles.
We are perhaps most disappointed that Mr. Riccitielloās resignation comes when the company appears to be on the right track and about to capitalize on both the transition to digital and the emergence of next generation consoles. EA may have more work to do, but we believe that Mr. Riccitiello had the company on the right course, and believe that EA is better positioned to grow earnings than any
On Twitter, people, Kotaku staff included, snarked about the resignation in light of EAās current rep and business practices.
For example:
John Riccitiello: 'Can I at least keep my EA pen?' 'Well technically John, it's not YOUR pen. It's a service we provided, soā¦ no.'
EAās number two, COO Peter Moore, who has been weary of public negativity about his company for some time, took umbrage. On Facebook, he called out our Twitter round-up of Riccitiello jokes a byproduct of our āself-smugness.ā I disagree, of course. What was Tweeted was, in part, an honest reaction from a lot of people who are uneasy about what EA seems to stand for. Itās a relevant part of the conversation about Riccitielloās legacy. That said, Iāll certainly miss interviewing Riccitiello. Iāll miss hearing about his vision for EA. But his vision has, so far, brought EA to its current uncertain moment, what Pachter believes is one-yard from the touchdown Riccitiello was hustling to reach for six years.
https://lastchance.cc/the-strange-scary-fascinating-exciting-future-of-vid-5919847%3C/a%3E%3C/p%3E
***
Back to Wee-Bey.
There is a scene in the first season of The Wire when one of the drug dealers in Avon Barksdaleās crew goes for a car ride with Barksdaleās hitman, Wee-Bey. The dealer, a conflicted man named DāAngelo, is convinced that heās being driven to his death. Wee-Bey lets him out of the car and has him enter a building. Itās dark in there. Itās clear this is the end.
DāAngelo gets ready for the worst. He waits for the gun and the shot.
Wee-Bey turns on the lights. The room has a big fish tank in it. Wee-Beyās going out of town and was hoping that maybe DāAngelo could feed his fish.
Wee-Bey wasnāt the man in charge. He wasnāt the boss. He was a man with a good side, despite his bad rep. You thought he was going to take that guy somewhere terrible. You thought he was going to ruin him. And then the lights were on and you realized you got it wrong. He was taking him somewhere good. All along.
Top pic: John Riccitiello at E3 2010, Credit: Michal Czerwonka/Getty; Lower: Riccitiello with Vice President Biden in the White House earlier this year. Credit: Susan Walsh, AP.
