October 15th, 2008

Electronic Arts’ Kill Generation

If I look carefully at what's happening around, and not only in the gaming industry, I can say it seems that, these days, for almost every company, comes a time when a "kill generation" is installed at the helm. For example, Microsoft and its "monkey boy," or - to really get into the gaming industry - Electronic Arts and all those who could change the way things are being taken care of... but they don't.

Today, I'll tell you about the head of this "kill generation," EA's boss, John Riccitiello, who spoke about not being afraid to discontinue development of titles if they don't live up to the expectations. This sounds nice, but I think the Need for Speed franchise should have been shut down a long time ago... anyway, that's my personal opinion, but let's see what the man has to say, shall we?

In an interview with Gamasutra, Riccitiello said "When something's not meeting expectations... you can course correct by giving it more time, more money, changing the concept or killing the game."

To put a nice cherry on the cake, he added that "If you're committed to quality, you take one of those paths. If you preclude any one of those paths, quality will suffer. EA will kill a game or two a year. Forever."

The interesting part is that EA may kill in-development titles that seem to be bad for a few chosen ones, but they wouldn't kill a game from a franchise that would even sell bricks, as long as they're labeled with a certain name. Am I right here, or not? After all, this is more like "preferential kill generation," and not "kill what sells unconditionally..."